A Woman I’ve Never Met

The one who delivers my newspaper. 
I’m in bed on the other side of a wall
when she arrives around 4 in the morning, 
aims her car up my snow-covered driveway,
snow still falling, shedding
in the light at the top of the pole 
at my intersection.
This the intersection I have with her:
her car door hanging open, 
her music raucous in darkness.
She runs toward my house,
rapid steps and then the chuk
of the bundle onto the welcome mat.
I have watched from the bathroom window,
opened it to better hear her radio,
cold air flowing around my face,
snow making its particular silent slant
in her headlights. She is not invisible.
I wait for the slam of her door, 
wait for the tail lights. Pair of red eyes.
She stops at another house down the way.
I think of her hand, 
her finger reaching to the dash, her
quick push to turn on the hazard lights.
Flashes, double quiet red, red, red.
Her silhouette, doing the work,
seen for a moment in the low beams.

MARJORIE SAISER

Marjorie Saiser’s Learning to Swim (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019) is part memoir, part poems. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, bosque, Water-Stone Review, Briar Cliff Review, American Life in Poetry, and at poetmarge.com.