You the Man


He pauses at length before each answer,
annoyingly recalling
that trick I sometimes encounter
of pretending not to have heard
or to be unable to credit
the question.  Then I realize
the pause is proportional to his years
spent caring for his mother.  Those
and the immediately preceding
failure of his first marriage left
a chronic doubt, a sense of being
behind the curve, blocked by a wave
from sight of any shore.  I can relate;
my first joint-living-arrangement
failed.  But I spent
the next five years alone, learning to write.
And I affect no timid smile;
rather push, with humor if possible,
or terrifying analyses or silence,
through what would otherwise be
the silence of others.  After
she died he remained
in his mother’s house, which he had
maintained and improved for her.
At work, some of his buddies
eventually fixed him up; they thought it was time.
I ask about office buddies:
how close are those relationships?
Do they relieve the boredom
of office life or merely somehow
orbit it?  And the bridge
between his eyes and mine fails
again.  But he eagerly outlines
his courtship and, with sincere
abstract superlatives, his wife,
whom I conceive as having once
been lost.  She moved
into his mortgageless house, where they began
to save.  I’m impressed;
would have thought that, seeking life,
freedom, arrival, they would have splurged,
as one does.  But they had,
late in life, two girls instead.
I imagine his movements, doubly
cautious with that papoose-pack,
whatever it’s called, on his chest.
He leaps two decades:
they are both now office-workers;
he too, still; the wife is ill,
but he hopes and believes “we’ll make it.”
I smile at him.  Humility, no doubt,
is called for.  It would do no good
to resent the fact that he never
asks *me anything.  Humbly, I try
to describe my late marriage,
and how grateful I am, for her,
to chance, to nothing in particular.
And in simple terms to explain
my work, the poem I’m writing
about him, the motives behind it.
But the expression with which
he greets what he thinks he’s hearing
would be called unearthly, on this or any earth.