Steve Scafidi is the author of two collections from LSU Press: For Love of Common Words and Sparks From a Nine-Pound Hammer. Although he sometimes teaches poetry at Johns Hopkins University, mostly he works as a cabinetmaker. He lives in West Virginia with his wife and children.
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Madrigal for the Lady!
In the Walmart parking lot at last
there she was—
the woman of my dreams
stumbling lost through a sunbeam.
The pace at which she moved was
not so fast. All
the cars like shining
hills gleamed. So came the woman
of my dreams stumbling slowly
through a sunbeam.
She had a look about her.
Like a woman from the Bible light
follows wherever she goes. Like that.
She had sweat-pants on.
She had a red bra
in a sheer plastic bag. It was probably
two hundred degrees in all the locked
hillsides it seemed.
Across the burning
asphalt—a little fat but in a good way—
was the woman of my dreams who
walked among
the fiery hills shyly
smiling in the tunnel of a sunbeam.