if poetry were a man
The landlord sits beneath a painting of a dog. The smoke of a dying
cigarette laces her chin. A bus stops beside her window. A boy
with blue hair sleeps on a girl’s shoulder. An older man toys
with his beard. The driver eyes a woman leaving, runs his hand
through his black curls. The landlord wants to speak of things,
little things. But how? She is an artist and doesn’t know it.
Her tenant is an artist and knows it. Neither makes art
in a town where poetry’s a man who may or may not notice
her today
a mile in the sleet is nothing, a train missed, a hem torn
in the hurry nothing. The promise not to smoke
goes where it came from, and she takes the winston,
borrows money to pay for coffee she could have made,
holds the last page of the last chapter in her gaze to give
him time. Oh if poetry were a man and man
a mute harbor, tell me what hour would pass without
her words pouring in the white ear and what evening
without the wrist by its white bed? Every bench along the
malecon he walks is hers, every evening he spends in
the bakery, hers, every reason to pass his balcony, hers.
What chair? What beggar’s stall with the words passing,
and she with her hand extended, unanswered? What timed
passion, what limit to madness? Come to her in a man
and watch her follow. No verse would pass the avenue
unnoticed. She’d visit every draft in its city, pound its door.
Plead for it. And every time he comes with his fists is the last
time, every warning, the last. A year passes. He still throws her,
breaks the plates, leaves her calls unanswered. Two nights and still
no volkswagen, still his silence. And when
it comes, because it comes in a man, she holds her words,
wears her prayer silks, raises her hands above her breasts, thanks
god for it. Then he leaves. Enough time passes. A grey trench coat
bows beneath a yellow awning, behind him, a beggar,
behind the beggar, her.
In another minute, he will bend to tie his right shoe,
and she will pass him the way strangers do when they wish
to be spoken to. And in the mind where a woman goes
to be a woman, he will follow her down the stairs, through
the train, not his, but where he wants to go now. In a town
where lovers keep her from the page and bring to her poems,
where thoughts remain permanent children in the nursery —
where an artist’s mind becomes like every other mind and nothing
passes a poet’s ear without a troubled woman
turning her neck to catch its gaze.