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The Amazing Falling Woman
Madeline Izzo
She looks through the windows
as she falls outside the building
Past office interiors filled with papers, files,
binders, lamp fixtures, people sitting,
standing, frozen like statues.
She slices past them, faster than
they can see her.
Falling, falling, catch a falling star
To live, to lose, to find again.
Will she ever know what she
is looking for?
They say Edvard Munch’s painting
The Scream could be someone
screaming of someone hearing a
scream. Which is worse?
He painted on cardboard with poster paint,
accidentally splashed wax on a corner.
Had he seen the violent red sky from
the bridge himself, was it Krakatoa
blasted from its place halfway across the world?
I have seen it, says the falling woman.
Have you?
What inspires an artist to paint?
Was Munch’s portrait an inner landscape
showing a horror outside, or
an outer landscape showing a horror within?
What’s the difference?
Our skin is more transparent than you think.
The woman falls past pigeons
on windowsills, past cornices, parapets, bricks.
They say your life passes before you
when you are about
to die, but this was not
that kind of fall, and she
was not that kind of woman.
She is the woman ever falling past
our windows, looking in
to the offices and cubicles where
we stare at screens, stand
and stretch, sit back down again,
gulp cold coffee from styrofoam cups.
Our lives are the styrofoam, the
thin carpeting, the voices
over the dividers.
We spend more focused time here
than at home, more sustained
hours toward deadlines, tasks
ticked off. We report
to bosses, who report to bosses
who spend hours in meetings, discussing
where to cut costs, where to boost revenues,
what contracts to sign,
how to renegotiate leases.
This is the minutaie of our lives,
what the falling woman sees,
not the coming home, not the
walking through the front door,
not the donning of jeans, nor
the sitting on the front porch with
a novel and iced tea, not the
immersion into another state of
slow motion, this one of our own choosing.
She does not see this placement, for
she is still falling, and
we are home safe, close
to our roots, away from our
cubicles and pencils and rulers, no longer
screaming from the bridge.
The sky is high and blue and clear,
and we can putter in the
garden or the basement if we
choose, or call up friends and
walk in the park, or just
sit and watch the dogs walk by,
marled and spotted and yelping,
oblivious to our watching, and to
the ancient dust of Krakatoa hovering
in the air.
—
Madeline Izzo lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she runs a small flower farm with her daughter and helps out doing odd jobs at a local flower shop. Her poems have appeared in Trajectory, Coneflower Café, Pudding Magazine, Mostly Maine, and Groundstar, her short fiction in the Licking River Review and Dream Weaver, and her nonfiction articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Shady Ave.
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