Cold day in a cool city
she walks without shoes 
down Telegraph Hill. 
Stops at a shattered 
bottle outside Cafe 
Trieste. Stoops, plucks 
with delicate fingers 
green spits of glass like 
petals of a flower. Drops 
them into a white paper bag. 

People stop, stare. Maybe 
mental? She’s unconcerned, 
gathering glass, legs unshaved
below a wool dress, toes 
splayed monkey-like for balance. 
Pimples cluster, spatter 
her face. A body stout, 
not stylish. A smile
of inner peace. 

Three young men
pause, snicker. 
“Hey!” one shouts. 
“Don’t you know you’re ugly?”
They laugh. She’s 
humming, gathering 
broken glass.

“You have the face of an otter.” 
She sits beside him, the only open seat.
“Yip,” he says imitating an otter’s bark, 
then wonders Do otters bark? 

He, professor of anthropology, white man 
with red beard recently divorced 
taking the Judah streetcar to campus 
where he will conduct a seminar 
on Incan migration patterns. 

She, to his practiced eye, of Native American 
bone structure and flesh (smooth, flawless) 
dressed to mop hallways and swab toilets. 

Pleasantly he asks “Do you like otters?” 
“We used to roast them on a stick,” she 
says. “First we’d sell the pelts.”
From her body he feels warmth, 
glow, like from a campfire.

“Are you making fun of me?” he asks.
“No. I would marry you.”
Awkwardly he laughs. “Now you’re making fun.”
“No no. I would marry you.”
And it comes to him: You, I, 
we could make beautiful babies.

At the campus stop as on a leash 
he follows black hair braided like strips of leather, 
a tassel like a tail over her butt. 
She steps to the crowd. Gone. 

A sharp pain in his leg as if 
caught in the steel jaws of a trap. 
Where did she go? Why is he here? 
A river of students part for his island, 
splash at his rocks.