clogged fissures
a pairing: Alice Neel, Woman on a Train, 1940
Alice Neel (1900-1984) was an American artist who went against the modernist grain. She is best known for her portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. My poem is about an encounter with a stranger, as told by a friend of a friend. This stranger seems like someone Alice Neel might have painted.
Lasagna for Karen “Every person is a new universe unique with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by.” Alice Neel The woman smartly hatted & dressed with the dish of lasagna in her lap was sobbing trying to contain her tears for public transit’s sake so I asked was there anything I could do though it was clear there was nothing to do but listen: listen to her story of the people she’d baked it for the people not her friends who never could be her friends even after the party even with the lasagna she just knew it to be the case. It could be she saw me eye the dish I didn’t say how good it smelled or she may have sensed in me something truer than false because when we reached the next stop and the doors opened she gave me a fixed look shy piteous glistening and placed the dish in my hands nodded once and then stepped off. That evening the talk was of the wisdom of eating a stranger’s food but I knew from her look a kindred thing: that some things given and with grace received no matter who how or where mean communion and further consummation and I felt for the moment along the clogged fissures of my heart that no one needed to taste this woman’s lasagna more than I did.



What a beautiful message this poem contains. Thank you most sincerely.
Another wonder sent off into the world. Thanks Alan.