She was like any woman running from sudden rain,
a pretty picture, lifting to her head the cheap bouquet
she’d bought at the corner fruit store perennially
named A & J no matter who owned it. Some protection,
laughed a man running opposite. She wanted to shout
Magritte, but the rain at once came down in a clatter,
face streaming, he sprinted past her, and wit doesn’t matter
when a tree limb springs at your feet, and unable to stop,
she leaped, part of her mind absorbing knobs, green with lichen.
Antic, really, how she goat-landed. Marzo é pazzo, she said aloud,
and water flew in her mouth. She thought of that dear man
who’d say that every March, head thrown back, gold-rimmed incisor,
a fascist childhood, sent to war on a bicycle, taken prisoner twice.
What would he say of this crazy March?
She entered the ornate lobby, soaked to her underwear, and that
hadn’t happened since she was a child. She needed to
make an anecdote of her great escape, to lessen it, probably,
but who would be her audience when even the gentle
obese doorman who frequently made himself scarce
had bragged of voting for fascism when she passed.