there was a woman

There was a woman walking down the central aisle of Zagara's,

the kind of woman that turns heads.  

Men's heads, women's heads. 

Her long shiny hair floating behind her, 

her chocolate coat like wings too. 

Her face was perfect, her skin had a warm undertone.

Ebullient eyes, long arms swinging.  

She was my age, maybe even older.  

Leaning toward fifty like her life would last forever.

I could not not look and look again. 

She had a four pack of pudding in her hand, 

golden butterscotch I think. (Odd I know).  

I watched her turn down the pasta aisle. 

She squatted down to inspect the items on the lower shelves. 

Who do you know that looks good down on their haunches?

No one, right?  But she did. 

I started dreaming of meeting her at some Chagrin Falls event, 

I would -- in this imaginary future intersection -- tell her

that I had seen her before and dreamed this friendship 

before she had ever spoken a word.  

It was her hair, her coat, her floating. 

She would laugh, touch my forearm, 

and some deep seed in me would shiver. 

There I was, deep into illusion, when she did it. 

Did the thing that defined her. 

She picked up a whole wheat pasta box, 

then turned and placed her pudding in a sauce display.

Shoved it way in the back where some 

minimum wage teenager would find it hours or days later. 

My hypothetical admiration, 

my loving peasant adoration, 

shrunk away to nothing.  

Everything beautiful about her

dissolved by that one act.

Beauty is more than skin deep. 

Beauty involves butterscotch pudding. 

Where it ends up when you are in a rush. 

Beauty involves carts, if they get walked 

all the way back into the building. 

Beauty involves turn signals, 

if they flutter in plenty of time. 

Beauty's not how well you take care of yourself;

it's how well you take care of others.