Maryanne McKenna

On hot afternoons
Maryanne McKenna sits in
her Adirondack chair,
ice tea and cigarettes
and a CD of Chopin,
dark glasses masking crow’s feet
with a straw hat hiding gray hair,
pretending someone still cares
whether her skin is smooth
or curls flaxen.  She wonders
why the world seems so tired
while she, at sixty-three,
has the energy to climb mountains
pent up inside of her unassuming
summer dress, the floral
print of a school girl on vacation.
She would go, of course, if it
wasn’t alone, she swore, she swears
and wears a smile as the church-folk
take their pity, extending dinner
invitations, their charity, all the while
hoping she’ll decline.

She lives in her grandmother’s house,
the one who, as a child,
thought it clever to call her
Anne Marie, so clever indeed.  But
why complain when Gram had candy
to spare she could call her Billy Ray
for all she cared, and she was kind enough
to leave the house in her will to
“Little Anne Marie,” confusing the lawyers
but good for a laugh.  This sweet little
house on the edge of town, built
before Americana was so quaint,
before the Rockwell paint had dried
and left white picket fences a piece
of used up kitsch, had a long driveway
winding lazy to the road, but close enough
so at night slow-driving passersby
could see a candle in each
of her front windows, five in all,
one for each man she lost.  Maryanne
was poetic, or so she wished,
sitting in the bright sun with a book
of Dickinson or Austen, wishing her
life, mostly spent, could inspire such
a story, but settling for little pieces
of melodrama, the silent flames in
her windows, tiny mysteries on display
to feed the rumor mills if anybody
cared enough to gossip.

The stories aren’t interesting enough
to mean much alone; this red one’s
for Marcus, who was too young for a wife,
so he said, and spent his life ahead of the law
for petty crimes of youth he never grew out of.
The white one in the bedroom is named
Andrew, husband number one, dead
of cancer at age thirty-two, “very tragic,
but nothing new,” she’d say with a shrug.
The other three were all men who,
with careless foibles, left clues for
Maryanne to find, jewelry receipts and
strange perfume, so unoriginal, too;
a secretary, a waitress, a dancer,
ghosts to leave her neighbors viewing
haunted open shades ringing loud with
her silent message, “here, a gift each night
from the woman you never wanted.”

By now she’s given up on candle number six,
just spends the days thanking God for alimony
that lets her sit all afternoon, drinking her tea,
blowing smoke rings and thinking
of mountains she may still climb
and poems she may still write.