SOMETHING THAT ASKS FOR NOTHING

Bowdoin College

There were men in orange vests beckoning clever bars of light on the St. Louis tarmac, slandered thinly with snow, when I came away from him— yet another job, he’d say, to be taken by computers, who never flinch against the cold and don’t have girls and opinions to divert them. They grow thoughts in the laboratories of reclusive men, just biding their time.

There were dirty remarks on the bathroom walls of a nation, a body upturned by duck hunters in the Ozark woods, girls were pretty and stupid under strip mall awnings. I’d loved one exhausted for a fast time by the time I got the car started again.

His pupils shrank to receive the sun when he came down from his stuff, and paradise fell from him.

I am sick, but not so sick I could not be well if he would just come back and hang up his coat and insist on renewing the lease, for it is bearable to live where a sofa pulls out to make a bed, the radiator finicks, woman and man smuggle the past like a boxcutter into a fight; a fight is just four good fists.

Then I am an artist who would rather be loved. Would rather be the lips he silenced in his paintings, the chimneys he gorged with smoke. Signs bearing all kinds of instructions convene

as four-way stops at evening on the streets we dress to walk like humans, and I will never be free.