The question that drives this poem comes from a stranger, but it lands somewhere much closer to home. "Are you ready, M'am?" the old carriage driver calls, and the speaker's reply, "Ready? For what?", sounds like someone being asked about something larger than a buggy ride. The title promises an account of "what I did after you left home," and the poem answers in its very first words, "Went to New Orleans," with the subject dropped, like a diary entry or a postcard. The title and the palm-reader's "single child" suggest that the absent "you" is a grown child, though the poem never says so outright. It never names the loneliness either. It shows a woman getting up into a carriage.
The central idea is that a life can open again just when it seems to have finished its main work. The sibyl's prophecy, "You'll live long, but two lives, different," hangs over the poem. The speaker's palm shows "a single crack foretelling a single child," and the crack in the lifeline becomes a hinge: the first life ends, and the second begins in a strange city at dawn. Small reversals mark the change. She is the one being asked if she's ready, and she places her hand in the old man's as a child might. When she says "Boost me up," she gives up dignity for the pleasure of the ride.
Her imagined audience matters too. The fourth stanza turns to address "you" directly: "You, I'm afraid, would have been / disdainful, cool." The speaker pictures herself "sweating in my purple dress, / gawking, singing along," leaning out over the horse's "bobbing feathered head." The portrait is unflattering and affectionate at once. She knows how she looks and does it anyway. The sibyl's advice, "try not to be so stingy," echoes earlier, when she asks "the cost" and then decides "There was no reason to refuse." The reluctant, careful woman of the first stanzas becomes a generous one, giving herself pleasure and spending a little.
The poem's form supports this loosening. It is free verse with no rhyme scheme, in five stanzas of uneven length, and the short lines follow the rhythm of speech, with fragments, a quoted question and a flat "I asked the cost." The sound still tightens in places. "Beaming in the steaming light" rhymes inside the line, and the phrases "tall red wheels," "spinning wheels" and "bobbing feathered head" give the carriage a rolling momentum. The dates printed beneath the title, spanning two working periods in 1999 and 2001, suggest the poem was revised over a long time. If so, that patience has paid off in its easy, offhand tone.
The imagery moves from washing to abundance. The morning begins with people "opening windows, / washing down the streets," a cleaning that matches a fresh start. The light then goes soft and unreliable: "steaming," then "impressionistic," a blur in which the other passengers seem "like people in a painting, or a play." At first she watches. By the end she is inside the picture. The last stanza floods the senses with "men in stiletto heels and black stockings," "women like statues, painted gold," and a city that "smelled like fresh coffee, / sour beer, things frying in lard." The smells are not tidy. The list is cheerful, a little coarse, and wholly alive, so the speaker's new life is not a polite one.
The ending is the poem's most understated move. After all the talk of lifelines and children, it closes on "little children, dancing" on "every bright wet corner." The speaker offers no moral. She never says she has stopped missing the one who left. Children appear everywhere, though, and the absent child's absence seems to have been joined by a world of young life. A "city dawn" is something she says she felt, so the dawn belongs to her as much as to the city.
This is why the poem is worth reading. It treats the moment after a loss of role without self-pity or a neat lesson. Its comfort is practical: say yes to the unplanned thing, accept the offered hand, and be willing to look foolish in a purple dress.