clogged fissures

a pairing: Alice Neel, Woman on a Train, 1940

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.