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Mark Williams reads
Never Too Late
in RealAudio format.
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Rosie drove a good half mile
before discovering she was drowning, pinned
behind the dashboard of her yellow pickup in
the rising brown water of Pigeon Creek,
just off the Maryland Street bridge.
As she pulled into the Knotty Pine Cafe,
her car radio announced, “Hairdresser,
Rosie Wells drowned a moment ago,”
as a soggy headline floated by waving
ROSIE, DEAD TODAY.
Through splintered glass,
three smiling carp, “buglemouth bass,”
her father used to call them, were tooting
her transcendence while Rosie pieced the morning
together in the Knotty Pine parking lot.
She slept through her alarm with time
only for a breakfast bar. Then out the door.
Lisa spent the night with Chuck, her father,
Rosie’s X. “Mother is, you know, boring,”
Rosie could imagine Lisa saying, compact
mirror in one hand, black lipstick, black
eye shadow in the other. Chuck,
driving Lisa back to college, nods.
Confluences that left Rosie alone,
driving, suffused in a caffeine-free fog,
instinctually heading for work (like a dog
nosing down familiar alleys) making
all the ladies look (and smell) alike
at Rosie’s House of Hair and Nails.
But as she crossed the Pigeon Creek levee
Rosie sensed a squirt or two across
unfamiliar alleys, sub-cortical gaps,
telling her wrists to twist a bit, to snap
the wheel before the bridge, to crash into the creek.
It seemed like an acceptable excuse, death,
from work and all. She went inside for caffeine,
greeted by Mildred the waitress, Sparky the cook.
“Say, Rosie, we heard you was drowned.”
“Yea,” said Rosie, “happened before I knew it.”
“Well, what are you doin’ in here?”
“Drying off, I suppose, before I drive to Phoenix.”
“What about our nails? How about our hair?”
“Zona at The End Zone. She’ll fix
you up. See ya Mil. Later, Spark.”
Back out in her dripping truck
a small goldfish flapped on the floor mat.
Rosie sped back to the Maryland Street bridge,
above the police and wrecker, and tossed him back.
Phoenix was news to her, but goodness knows
she’ll never have a better chance.
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