Men I Haven’t Known
1
He’s from Michigan
where (I imagine)
the grass grows a dusky shade of blue
and the sky leans off
like a great piece of flat blue shale to the west,
in case you want to head that way.
He didn’t.
Michigan is full of people, I’ve
never met them
and I can’t keep them straight.
Here I know a few people. And so often
the connection is tenuous,
and so with him, although I
let him talk,
and talk, God knows.
In the olden days the Great Lakes
washed people west, and
with them this accent (this way
we pipe the letter a from our noses)
spilled out onto new shores.
The accent reminds us still of ourselves.
Funny, because the water actually flows
the other way and directions
aren’t so clear any more.
And perhaps that’s what happened to him.
Caught in the flow,
washed up here.
2
He knelt on the little knoll
above the ninth green
above the clubhouse
to wait while I finished.
I felt him watching me.
We were in junior high.
Now, now
I know
what he was feeling.
3
Face flushed, very back
seat of the bus.
Not me.
It wasn’t the heat.
He was making out with
another girl, a girl
who’d already grown breasts.
My heart was too innocent
to break just yet
(but later, oh
later
4
I worshipped my dreams at the time
and determined to have one about him
and at last I did.
We passed each other on the
landing of a stairway, he
ascending, I descending.
We didn’t speak.
Then it happened we did talk
becoming friends of sorts for awhile.
He told me of a girl he’d loved.
She pulled her hands up
into her coat sleeves
when she was cold.
He was thin. He never
touched me, and eventually the
knockabouts of other affairs
rubbed all trace of him away.
5
On paper he looked good.
Divine, in fact
and I knew it was a betrayal to give him up
6
My landlady got to the phone, not me
and it being 3 a.m.
that was the end of that.
And I thought it was someone else who called
and was disappointed to learn it was
this one
He was bearded, and smelt sour
I was slightly astonished by him,
as if a stray dog had offered to teach me the tricks.
7
This one clipped my wings.
It was his arrogance, or confidence
I’d shifted my weight and my knee brushed
his under the table
and he looked up, at me and said
I have a girlfriend.
As if I hadn’t known. Divine as a doll, she was
with auburn hair to her waist
like an angel’s cape
I did know better than to protest
As if I’d wanted him. Not hardly.
8
She wanted to leave the others
It was a party.
She wanted, she said, to go for a walk in the woods.
I wondered what she wanted
and I knew
and I said no.