Women Who Roam the Night Without Seeking a Man
Women who roam the night without seeking a man,
or a bed with a man inside,
or a lingering gaze—or to linger in a gaze.
Women who are enough and know how to be enough,
who, if they wander, do so for the sake of wandering, not to be found—
perhaps only to make others lose their trail.
Women sated with the world around them,
yet never sated with themselves.
Women who try
to stay a step ahead of their own anxiety,
by choosing the last seat in the back, to the left, the one in the curve, the quietest,
in a dusk lit with anise, in the copper shimmer of the bar counter,
in the axis of perfectly poised hips,
on the floor.
These women, in their solitary silence,
in the sharpness of a dream,
in the desperate disregard for a thought perhaps too ordinary,
in the useless self-gazing, in the gasp of suffering
and within the square meter of a bold hesitation—
women like me, like you, and others,
who do not know where to place themselves—
to these women I dedicate
the hoarse voice of a good greenish day,
juniper and tobacco,
a place where even a piano played in the distance
would help us not feel out of place,
where the world must find another voice for its dictionary:
not lovers, not wives,
not desperate, not whores.
Ah yes, there should be the whistle of a baker on a bicycle,
a French song, an aphorism, a perfect sentence.
There should be shelter.
On certain greasy mornings where the heat drowns even high heels,
and where homes always seem too far away to return to.
