This a little different from my previous posts. You might call it an attempt at poetry, if it is indeed a poem. I submitted it to a writer's forum, and one critic maintained that it wasn't a poem at all, by his lights. He called it, instead, a piece of flash fiction. He may have been right that it wasn't a poem, but he was wrong when he called it fiction, because everything happened just as I told it.
I turned the corner past the cereal section at the Safeway
And there stood my first wife Margie,
Murdered more than twenty years ago,
While I was thousands of miles away,
Before either of us were prepared to say good-bye.
But there she was, the same age as when she died,
Straight brown hair flowing down her shoulders nearly to her waist,
Down to the elbow of a dark blue raincoat
Like the one she used to wear.
It wasn’t really her, of course,
Although it could have been a niece
Or even the daughter we might have had
If our lives had streamed a different way.
And then the woman looked my way
And saw me staring at her. She gave me a fleeting smile
So much like the smile that Margie used to give me
When I needed comforting.
You know what that smile usually means
When given by a woman who catches a man staring at her.
It’s the smile that women smile in self-defense.
The smile that says, "I’m no threat.
Please don’t hurt me."
But I didn’t take it that way.
To me, it was Margie herself
Smiling from beyond the grave,
Telling me that everything’s all right now.
That she’s at peace.
And I felt a little of that peace, too, just then.
The moment passed, and she wasn’t Margie anymore.
She was just some random woman buying cereal.
I turned and went back the way I came.
But, for the first time
I had closure
If that’s what closure is.
