Visiting Hour

From the hospital solarium we watch rowhouses
change with evening down the avenue, the gardener

bending to red asters, his blonde chrysanthemums.
Each day I learn more of the miraculous.

The gardener rocks back on his heels and softly
Riva talks to me about the d.t.’s, her gin

hallucinations. The willow on the lawn
is bare, almost flagrant in the wind off

Baltimore Harbor. She wants me to brush her hair.
Some mornings I’d hear her sing to herself

numbers she knew by heart
from nightclubs on the waterfront circuit.

I wondered if she watched herself dissolve
in the mirror as shadows flickered, then whispering,

gathered. Floating up the airshaft
her hoarse contralto broke over “I Should Care,”

“Unforgettable,” and in that voice
everything she remembered—the passage

from man to man, a sequence of hands
undressing her, letting her fall like the falling

syllables of rain she loves, of steam, those trains
and ships that leave. How she thought for years

a departure or a touch might console her, if only
for the time it takes luck to change, to drink

past memory of each stranger that faltered
over her body until her song was a current

of murmurs that drew her into sleep, into
the shapes of her fear. Insects boiling

from the drain, she tells me, a plague
of veiled nuns. Her hair snaps, electric

in the brush, long, the color of dust or rain
against a gunmetal sky. I saw her once, at the end

of a sullen July dusk so humid that the boys
loitering outside the Palace Bar & Grill

moved as if through vapor. She was reeling
in spike heels, her faded blue kimono.

They heckled her and showered her with pennies,
spent movie tickets. But she was singing.

That night I turned away and curse myself
for turning. She holds a glass of water

to show her hands have grown more steady.
Look, she whispers, and I brush

and braid and the voices of visiting hour rise
then wind like gauze. The gardener’s flowers nod,

pale in the arclamps that rinse the factory boys
shooting craps as they always do down on

Sweet Air Avenue. I know they steam the dice
with breath for luck before they toss,

and over them the air shimmers the way still water
shimmers as gulls unfold like Riva’s evening hands

across the sky, tremulous, endangered.