Terrance Hayes

Woman Walking on the Road

We were in the car. We were heading home when Christian
with his wholly American name & manic chatter told his girlfriend
the woman we saw walking on the road with no umbrella
was a symbol of torment.We were in the backseat--
you with that face making the windows & the black world
beyond the windows beautiful, the roadside figure of a woman
in the rain beautiful & I knew later I'd be writing these lines,
caught in that space between personal & public:
a woman's torment or symbol of it & our love & goddamn
everybody's sins scribbled here for show. We were in the car
heading home when Christian said the woman on the road
was probably fresh from a fight with her husband,
but he didn't say his fists gave his last girlfriend bruises
& I didn't say it either... The woman was walking alone
on the shoulder & meant something different & utterly the same
to each of us-- her lit up life & husband left looking
from a window, as I have looked from a window, guilty.
But Guilt ain't nobody's business. We were in the car, we saw
a woman walking on the road. There was a woman who,
after our quarrels, would steal my car, a little blue Datsun
with a dented fender. She'd drive from our dorm to the blank streets
of the town we lived in; she'd drive past the empty classrooms,
the soccer field, to God knows where & I wanted her, then,
away from me-- two red lights, a tired engine leaving smoke.
But one night I groped in the darkness beneathe my hood
until I disconnected something & if there is such a thing as malice,
that was it-- a man sabotaging his own car so his lover couldn't run...
I'm shaking my head because I want to say I'm different now,
like Christian-- someone with a new face beside him & a pain
no one can see, perhaps, settled in his chest. Your new face
beside me. I am damaged, I have bruised. We fought over something
stupid & she came so close I knew she could smell my blood.
Have I come far enough to say I hit her; to say my hand left a cloud
on her cheek? Have I come far enough to say, I'm sorry? We were
in the car, you with that face making the windows & the world
beyond the windows real; the figure of a woman on the road
telling the truth. Once in my small brutal past a woman left me,
walked from my lit up fingers to the street with a storm on her face.
It was raining. I watched from the window & could not follow,
my car sat in the lot disconnected, unopened, unmoved.

Terrance Hayes

Woman Walking on the Road is from Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2005, Tia Chucha Press 1999).

Posted on January 19, 2008 2:20 PM