Immeasurable

Today a woman of no measurable age stopped me

to ask where she could buy some meat, and her eyes

filled up with tears when it seemed too far or impossible

and every shop was closed. I could do nothing but stand there,

vibrating in the hesitant spring. We were just two more

meandering women going slow in the empty street. Some of us

looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes,

others looking up, sending out our million help me messages.

We stood there with nothing obvious passing between us but time.

Then she smiled and went away. And I thought of the four people

the Buddha met in his travels: sick person, old person,

dead person, happy person with nothing. And I felt like all of them.

Ronna Bloom, 2020, in the Fall issue of ARC Poetry Magazine.