THE WITCH


THE WITCH


When Mindy first began
writing down thoughts
of magic and desire in
a diary kept safely in
her underthings drawer

she lived with a husband
who cashed his paycheck
at the corner bar and 
three small children who
cried all day long but
never cried to sleep

for she would sing to them
the sweet hill songs that
her mother sang to her back
when she grew up in that
sort of county where they
teach the women how to pray
and the men how to fight

When Mindy first began
collecting books of
secret and shadow she
lived in one small room

sharing the hall bath with
a pair of junkies who took
turns rifling her suitcase
a wrinkled hooker who once
asked her to make a doll
that looked like her pimp
and a landlady who smacked
her hand with a Bible when
she was late with the rent

So she wrote down her poems
of Witches and ravens and
songs to what sleeps inside
of hills and old trees in
an odd little building once
built for a Masonic Temple
now an old curmudgeon hosting
the Greenwich Village library

and on those evenings when
the City left her alone
she lit a white candle
whispering its flame
high above the wick
casting spells of redemption

When I first met Mindy
at Livia's Poetry Salon on
a night when snow fell in
sheets of blank white paper
all of us poets matching
the rising snow banks with
drifts and drifts of verse

she cleaned the homes of
other families part-time
and slept when she could
at a women's shelter and
then she slept with me and
ate well and read my books
and then she slept on a couch
at Athena and Redwolf's flat
and sewed together a robe and

then she found a better job
bought me beer and pretzels
every day for a week and
said that right now she
didn't want to sleep with
anyone but her children
safe again in her arms
and she drank two beers
for every one of mine

For her diary had cost
a day in court which
terrified her because
she had been taught
to honor God and Law

and her day in court had
cost three crying babes
whom she valued beyond
salvation and soul and
her husband which she
figured was on the house

and her books cost one
small room and a landlady
who tossed her library
into the back alley to
rot in the autumn rains

and tossed Mindy herself
with a coat and a suitcase
and one white candle into
the wind and the storm
and the lightning burn
of freedom
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