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One Afternoon [“A woman stepped outside, crumbled...”]

By Joanie Mackowski b. 1963 Joanie Mackowski

A woman stepped outside, crumbled

into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze

blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful

of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway,

and five of her teeth slipped between

her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor

unbuttoned her blouse to scratch

at her suddenly red and luminous skin.

Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly

drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars,

old scatterbrains, they commiserated.

It didn't rain. Strange, the granular woman

thought to herself: although I encompass

so much, I accomplish so little.

Her car sparkled with her hair and bones;

her garden thrived. She tried to think:

why did this happen? what had I eaten?

why was I bothered?—those old hours,

spotted and exotic lizards, darted

the gravel, flicking through their colors

of skin as one flicks channels on a tv.

She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock

of sparrows converging for the skull

of an oak, all her twittering dust,

her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds

of her fingers clawed for the sky;

what an interesting cloud someone said.

NOTES: This poem was later published in Mackowski's book View from a Temporary Window (2010) as the sixth section of the poem "Case Studies in Metamorphosis," with the section title "Comedy."

Source: Poetry (July/August 2007).

Biography

Joanie Mackowski’s collections of poems are The Zoo (2002) and View from a Temporary Window (2010). She received a BA from Wesleyan University, was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and received a PhD from the University of Missouri. A professor at Cornell University, she has worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler. She is the winner of the 2003 Kate Tufts . . .

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