How to Thank a Stranger

Etiquette Rule # 47: How to Thank a Stranger

Looking back at it after, oh, wait, yes, 

twenty-five years to clarify? I have to think

this could have gone so much worse

this body and all her choices

could have come up with another plan

and then I would think

how much of what we insist

we decide we insist we’re clear about

is really gut reaction in the fug

and a smack of good luck!

of the sufferable weight of loneliness,

how a man’s hand

slides up from a shoe to my inner calf

                (he’d taken me there on his motorcycle

                I’d never ridden one

                I’d knocked the helmet on my lip trying

                                to get it on
                I’d hugged his denim back

how in the speck and dapple I watched

my mind rise up to the branches in a woods I never would have

made my way

out of.  He wasn’t the kindest man, and his lips

had no tension and I remember his rough chin

the most and wondered when, after I let go,

it would be all over and he would either kill me

or take me home.  Those were my two choices. 

The woods were quiet the way only woods are.

Crows--I wonder were they really that close? were cawing

                and watching through the small hole of their eye

                how I went limp

                and the bowl of earth

                he’d laid me down into

                rose up to my shoulders

                and wet and almost whole

                what I’d held on to the entire ride there

                came up and splashed against the back

                of the yes or no elephant between us.  Something

                black flew over.

The ride back behind him was old towns and church spires.

I remember reading "The Steeple-Jack" by Marianne Moore

and I remember we were, I had a, there was a something

for class and the Congregational Churches or the Methodist, or listen

it wasn’t the assignment I couldn’t remember it wasn’t

even that I’d come out of the woods

alive with a near stranger that I was ecstatic about

it was that town after town on the back of that bike

I kept

reciting that last stanza to myself

and I buzzed with the concussion of it as I breathed my puke breath

against his bouncing back  The rush of my near (FUCK) miss:

               

                It could not be dangerous to be living

                                in a town like this, of simple people

                who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church

                while he is gilding the solid

                                pointed star, which on a steeple

                stands for hope.

If I climbed any flight of stairs after that and looked out

it wouldn’t be any kind of vertigo like coming out of a woods

unharmed and KNOWING, an occasional birch leaf or moss sleeve

itching my bum. 

I’d just been brushing off

that falling off isn’t only down from a tall place.

It is up sometimes.  It is the moment of a crow

going low over me in that hollow

and later, looking back, his coming upon

my sick

to pick out his due,

a you owe me I saved you blue

tucked under his breast feather, ruffling it,

but it could have been the wind.