Member-only story
Hallways
a poem about a song
Last night I heard the janitor singing. He was singing about Italy, about the fountains of Rome and a woman with bare arms as white as the moon. Maybe it was love, maybe it was indifference, maybe he knew the difference. He sang absently as if it wouldn’t make the time go faster but might make the time more interesting. Her name was Rosalee, and I wondered why it wasn’t Maria, but maybe she came from Spanish blood and that’s why he loved her, all that dark Spanish blood making dove-white skin. Perhaps she is old now, stooped a little, certainly pot-bellied from the fifteen children she bore Alberto who was too fond of the wine and the dances and died in 1974 of heart failure, but then, don’t we all?
The janitor sings this song every night, the hallways glistening behind him like white arms in moonlight.
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Copyright 2009 Marguerite Floyd all rights reserved
This poem first appeared in Everyone’s Daughter, 2009
