Saturday Poetry: Prospect Park III

 for Rachel Fruchter

Brooklyn is a small town

made up of villages.

Two such are at Clarkson and New York Ave.

Two hospitals:  One for the blessed, one for the rest.

Across the street from each other,

Downstate and Kings County,

first cousins, sharing blood and family,

yet, wary all the same.

Rachel lived in both.

Every Monday Rachel left Downstate,

her world of postdocs and clinical trials,

the world of NIH grants and abstracts

and jaywalked to Kings County

to be with her women.

Those women you see on the trains,

with 5:30 in the morning subway faces,

hands curled around hungry pocketbooks so dear,

Once a week Rachel offered them a Pap smear,

the first of their babymaking, closemouthed lives.

She collected, from these reticent ones,

their stories so that they might not have to die

of cancer undiscovered or AIDS denied.

At the end of the day, after tallying her results,

Rachel would argue for more money

for research and treatment.

But her committee was perplexed.

I can get another one to clean, they'd think

as she pleaded, if this one quits.

So, Friday, after another week of this

Rachel left to come home to me

and our standing date.

After 30 some years of marriage, 2 kids,

2 countries, and all the in-between

we saved Friday night for the movies,

for Saturday was for cleaning and shopping

and Sunday (in the way that people like us lived)

was for leisure.

A ride, she told me, I'm going for my ride.

Rachel loved to bike in the Park.

My round-hipped, gray-haired

professor wife would take the curves

of the bikers' lane in jubilation from the week's battles.

It was her courage and stubbornness

that allowed her to survive

in the labyrinth of Downstate,

and cost her her life.

For Rachel, a woman of brains

a-plenty never rode with a helmet.

I don't need it, she told me,

it's safe in the Park.

I see Rachel on her Sunday ride,

I can see that final Sunday,

hair sailing as usual when

over the hill pounced the rusty van,

too fast for a Sunday, too fast

for the Park and the curves

and for Rachel

whose next sight was a strolling mother.

So, she swerved.

She steered towards her right instead

and whomped by a dollar van

(full of Haitians it turned out)

Rachel, my brave Rachel, was

thrown all over the street.

The EMT's knew where to take her.

The people's hospital, her other home,

where the emergency team

wrestled all day with Death, but lost.

Dear Rachel would have been pleased, anyway.

The care, the passion they lavished on

my beautiful wife -- insured and white --

was something that she fought for

every Monday, in the villages,

all her life.