When Women Went Downtown

The city was brick and stone in the time

before glass and steel. In those days

the city was streets of women.

They climbed down from buses

in seal skin, navy straw hats stuck with pearl drop pins,

their double-knotted Red Cross shoes,

clutching black cowhide purses, leading the children.

They lunched in tea rooms

on chicken-a-la-king and quartered sandwiches

but never wine--and never with men.

Rising in the smoky air,

their voices blended--silver striking off silver.

They haunted book rental booths,

combed aisles of threads and zippers,

climbed to the theater balconies, the palaces

where Astaire dipped and turned them

into more than they were.

In the late afternoons they crowded the winter dusk

waiting at the Isle-of-Safety, for the bus

with the right name to carry them home

to the simmer of soup on the stove,

the fire’s sweet red milk.

Evenings, far over the tiny houses

the wind swept the black pines like a broom,

stars swirled in their boiling cauldron of indigo

and the children floated to sleep to the women’s song

zipping the night together, to the story

of the snow goose who went farther and farther

and never returned.

------- Patricia Fargnoli