Woman From Bleecker Street

She lies naked on a Haitian cotton couch,
from a wooden dish sucking pomegranates—
the skin, the pits, the juice—

and from this you see the vertex of your being.
It is her promise to save some for you:
blood red her lips, redder her nipples, she says,

“There's love in this room.” Her daughter’s coo
from the crib across the hallway draws you closer
to yourself, for mother shared her fruit

with someone long before you came,
someone you do not know
and fear you will. “Together we are one,”

she says. How did this woman take you
to her just moments before,
you heaving in the hammering pavement,

she swaying through the heat,
a seamstress of the street,
sewing a shroud of silken air,

wrapping her musk around the thighs
of every man she passed?
You followed her down Bleecker Street

and climbed the narrow stairs behind her.
So now she gives you her coupons and her cash
and sends you to Smiley's Deli, leaving you

consumed with the finite limits of this flaming future.
The streets look different:
the men, unwrapped, are strangers

in a Tooker painting, sullen, uniformly waiting
their turn, each pacing, their heavy shoes
sinking into the pavement, the eyes

implanted in their napes asking you
when you’ll finish up, when you’ll spend
the last worth of your fingers and your tongue.

You reach the counter at Smiley’s Deli,
milk and diapers in hand, and the clerk says,
“That’s not the brand she likes,”

and before you can ask, “The diapers or the milk?”
you see where she has sent you,
you know where you are going:

for the vectored Greenwich Village streets,
all funnel down the Sheridan Square subway
whose trains rumble in the darkness underground

transporting men rubbing themselves against the poles
davening from their loins, drowning in their sperm,
moving farther from her in fading memory,

you still carrying her bag, the expired coupons,
the soured milk, the yellowed diapers,
the change falling to the floor from your fraying pockets.

Yes, you have always been one of these men— 
none together one with her but each to himself—
and the woman from Bleecker Street

lies alone, wheezing on her deathbed,
as her daughter lies naked on the couch
sucking pomegranates.
 

Phil Vassallo holds a B.A. in English from Baruch College, an M.S. in education from Lehman College, and a doctorate in educational theory from Rutgers University. He has taught writing for Cornell University, Kean University, and Middlesex County College. He has published over 100 poems in various print journals and websites. His column on education issues, "The Learning Class," has appeared in various newspapers and magazines across the nation and on EducationNews.org. Seven of his plays have been produced Off-Off Broadway, and he was a recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship and a finalist in three national playwriting competitions.
E-mail: vassallo@aol.com


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