Thursday, November 22, 2007

Man in a parking lot


My friend, Alison sent me this poem below.
She is my Aunt Nola's bestfriend and a cancer survivor.
She HAD breast cancer which had spread to her lungs....but thanks to Ambrotose.....she is cancer free. She is such a giving person.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Love,
Michele

Man in a Parking Lot

When you have a son
you start seeing men
backwards, intuiting their childhood
selves beneath the years of accretions--
the bags and jowls, paunches,
thickened, crumpled skin,
the whole weight of the individual
personality, its freight of filters,
opinions, prejudices, habits,
likes, congealed--as if you knew them
before they even knew themselves.

So when a man stumbles toward you,
mumbling, across the Cubb's Foods parking lot,
unkempt and coatless in the snow,
and your discriminating mind says
"madman," "danger," though he never
once looks up, locked in an altered world,
fixed, unfixable, you lock your car door and then
sit there wondering how it happened,
when things started going wrong.
Knowing he was once a toddler--
for pity's sake--you find it
strange, unreal, this mane of wild
grey hair, grey beard. Somehow
you know it doesn't belong on him,
all that hair, and you don't know
how he got to be so lost, so sick, so old.

by Catherine Jagoe
from Casting Off (c) Parallel Press 2007

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