when I was an angry little girl
filled with the pressing, helpless rage particular to children
I would look for fissures in the sidewalk to step on
and stamp my small foot hard
secure, even at that age, in the falseness of the superstition
but this morning my mother, shrunk now to human size
lay down on the surgeon's table to bare her spine to the knife.
cutting first from the back and then from the front
for nine hours the doctors fought
to put what was wrong right again
in a far off city, I went to work as usual
almost as old now as she was then
but filled once more with the same orphaned powerlessness
all the way from 15th Street to 54th and back
I did not step on a single crack.
