When I was growing up in Washington D.C.
there were a number of women who were cleaning women,
so we had them around there.
They have an estate all their own,
but in Washington they were into the government buildings.
And I used to see them at night at the bus stops waiting
to go into a building either to clean it
or leaving the building, and for some reason
that image came to me recently of cleaning women.
And I wrote this poem about Hattie Elder.
She doesn't really exist, but then she does.
If you held her, her bones would crack and sink
into their skulls like morning frost.
You would not know that her body had scrubbed
its way into the flesh of the dreams of her husband
and children and grandchildren with every swing of the mop
or fall of floor that held the footprints of executive suites
in cold, unmanageable buildings, or that she once made peace
with little imputed dreams that called
to her in the language she surely felt but never
completely understood or wanted to know as she was conflicted
and given to odd things, old things,
things are predestined her to that of caretaker.
But if you dare to touch her, woman
of so many years of benign love the living
of which comforted her in pale and impossible moments,
you would know her bones and now gnarled
hands carried within them a rich and profound blessing
and was even too heavy for her to bear,
so she was thankful for the skin of her dreams
thinning as the days went by.
She was thankful, and if you dared to touch her,
you would know that what she meant
as she searched your face like the road leading
to her tiny house, the bone and home of it
and whatever traveled in your eye.
Her tidy floors were her floors.
No one else could clean them as well as she,
and whoever walked upon them had been blessed by her.
She took pride in that and a certain care that
outlasted the pain she felt in her legs and arms
and back and the wheelchair she knew awaited for her trouble.
Sometimes the buildings talked to her,
and she talked back while riding the midnight bus to home
and what there awaited.
And you would know if you dared to touch her
that her presence was what counted even
as her fragile figure beckoned you into a shelter of whatever
is permanent, for touching her would expose your mortality.
But if you were fortunate, she would direct her eye
to a black and golden butterfly, the monarch of the lens of all
your fallible senses, and you would
see her enter into its wings for a midnight nap
while the executive suites smoldered, brightened,
and beckoned in the dark.