She smokes the last cigarette of the day,
puts down her Jane Austen.
Another sore-feet day at the credit union,
returning to the apartment complex at Melrose
she shares with a handful of randy kids.
Too late, she appreciates the quixotic honor
of men like Clampett. The headline read:
Bodine, Heir to Fortune, Takes All to Chase.
Drysdale Ruined in smaller print, and she with him.
Drysdale lies at Forest Lawn, not at the bank now,
last in a line of unremarkable graves:
Granny, old age; Jed, city living;
Ellie May, drowned in the cement pond;
Drysdale, by the .38 he kept in his desk.
She saw him dead that afternoon, went to lunch
and never returned.
written about 2000, revised recently
poetrytech 
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