Staring fixed at the rows
Of flowered
Wallpaper a pale gray
In the dark efficiency--
The three walls still absent
To her consciousness
As a shadow of silver lightning
Fades the greyness
Of one portion in her view--
The "schitzophrenic" lifts
up a cigarette hidden behind
An ashtray and the flat ground
Of ashes on the table, which
Skid and resurface with her
Hot breathing. She thinks they are
Continents drifting, and herself
Upon them.
From feeling stiff and pushed under--
Numb to the point of a corpse--
With insecurity enough not to remember,
Even, her ABC's, Rita runs into the night
Where outside of a window
She blesses the workers making
Colonial bread.
An old man in a cowboy hat, Herb,
Is saddled on the wooden railing of a porch
To an apartment complex: seated there beside a
remembrance
Of a young woman like Rita.
And in the spitting fumes; bad-muffler sounds;
The rocking phallicism in radio music of passing cars,
He feels he has to move or die
And gets down
To his pickup.
And Rita, upon dawn and upon the end of rain,
Walks the streets again after tiring,
Ready to go back and confront the curfew-conscious
Group home, and the "zero" on her record full of
Zeros. She worries about carrying in her womb
A mini-Herb with scabs of grey hair
And little pot-holes in his tiny face,
Though she is still a virgin.
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