PORTRAIT

She sits in her car with the windows rolled up, slumped
between the seatback and the door. It’s the end
of October, but the sun still beats the windshield
into a blinding sheet of light. She notices

the mountains, blue and hulking, in the distance,
like a child’s drawing of a monster,
pinned to the wall of a cubicle. A sandwich
sits beside her on the passenger seat, untouched,

wrapped in tinfoil, inside a paper bag. She’s listening
to public radio. A four-hundred-year-old symphony
is playing. It’s easy to forget, for just a moment, that these

are her legs in black polyester pants, that these are her fingers
with their ragged nails and paper cuts, that her job
is contained within that fortress they call a building, that happiness
lies perhaps a hundred miles north or east of here.

On her way home she’ll make a left at Torrey Pines, drive past
the rundown bungalows, fifteen-mile-per-hour
school zones, guard dogs so thin you could count their ribs, and

she will remember suddenly her body: her hands
on the steering wheel, her back against the leather seat.