A man looks at a beautiful woman
who is trying to get him through a door,
him and his leg-brace: clumsy hammered
carapace of metal,
shrapnel on the outside of his body
from a war he must have forgotten
or never fought. Some spike
on him is caught down there. She bends over
and he looks at her graceful rump, and thinks rump,
and then thinks: pear on a plate,
and, on the underside, two apples.
He can't believe he can be so trite,
like some shoddy derivative painter,
and so removed from her. Aren't those thighs?
Isn't that hair? He opens the highs, strokes the hair,
nothing stirs. He thinks harder, tries vulva;
a word like a part in a car motor,
something made of rubber, an oily valve
that squeezes and turns itself inside out.
No hope for it. Once
he would have been able to smell her,
pungency of spring pond and soft onions
mixed with a coy deodorant,
eyelet and armpit, and beyond that
the murmur of willows, leaves
of sunlit weeds crushed under her,
but now she has no such halo.
She stands up and smiles at him,
a smile so translucent
he wrinkles in it, like the skin
on steamed milk.
He's nothing to her but luggage
she needs to haul from room to room,
or a sick dog to be kind to.
She says, "Shall we try again?"
he thinks, I am angry. She takes his arm.
He thinks, I will die soon.
