Connectness of Women

There must have been a model
for the painting, and she looks, to me,
a bit like Hurston (Zora Neale) or
Catherine Zeta-Jones, which strikes
me as surprising and delightful
that a painting on the wall could
conjure up two famous women,
one with skin like fine brown silk
who walked the streets of my home town,
and wrote and taught and said bodacious
things we quote today. At one time she
was married to a younger man, full
quarter century her junior. The painting
also puts in mind another woman,
Welsh with skin like polished cotton,
singer, dancer, actor of the stage and
screen who's married to an older man,
full quarter century her senior. Neither
woman has a thing to do with me,
but as I lie here on a hotel bed beneath
a painting of someone else entirely, all four
of us are, briefly, friends, connected in
some cosmic way we needn't understand.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2014