The lights glowed, small, pinpoints
like the tiny globes of fireflies or sprites
frozen in ice—they lined the fence, same
wood lattice that spread across the back
patio where we used to sit. (They would drink
beer and I would sip my tea, and roll my eyes,
and wonder if I might be better off
somewhere else, or maybe I would eventually
dissipate, fade from obscurity…rusted, like
an old part, left in a field, I would return to
the earth, food for the worms—inevitable decay
accelerated by the moist, hot air overwhelming me,
generated, as it was, in abundance
from their words.)
No one would have
noticed, what with the way they went
on and on perpetually with their complaints
about everything and the way they seemed
to know…just know…the answers to the
secrets of the universe—if only the universe
were smart enough to see their brilliance.
But who was I?
Some girl.
Quiet. In the corner, I could have been
a wax doll; I could have been vapid, anxious,
ignorant, I could have been an idiot and maybe
someone pleasant to look at, but even that had
grown tired from all the miles traveled…
I had small hips, finally, and wore high heels, and
I could pay for my own dinner at Croce’s Restaurant
and Jazz bar, eyeing the Mediterranean Hummus served
with roasted red peppers and garlic flat bread or the Golden
Ahi Poke, with mango, sipping Pellegrino with a wedge of lemon…
We would sit beneath the heat lamps, cordoned off
from the street of the Gaslamp and watch the crowd pass by—
adjusting our ties and skirts and feeling like grown-ups stupid to
enough to pay $20 for parking.
And so what that I had begun to grow, quietly, into
some kind of exotic, peculiar beauty—when beneath it
all, no one noticed that I might have had
a brain, or something to say, or anything to contribute.
I’m an appendage. But not very useful; I keep pulling away,
eyeing the road for escape routes…that police horse, for example,
or the man giving bicycle-drawn cart rides to tourists.
But that was years ago. Only, right then, on the back patio,
I was reminded, from the way the lights glowed, the way I was
circled, just so, by a group of men who looked right through me
as if I was simply an accessory—as if I might not have
had a voice of my own, or anything interesting going on
inside this head, beneath this brown hat, and because I’m
so quiet, it’s a given: I am simply
some girl, who might very well be a
temporary distraction from the REAL focus,
which is always music: “I’m sorry,” he says, pausing,
“what was your name again? I wasn’t listening.”
I plan to speak louder, then.
05.14.09
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