At the table in patio seating, <br />a young man starched into my evening <br />in waiter black and white-- <br />he's probably named John, Tom, <br />something less spectacular than the busboy <br />named Ari at the table beside me. <br />He is a boy I've seen and I hide that from him, <br />a silence he doesn't understand as he turns away <br />not remembering that a week ago while waiting for a bus <br />I saw him step over the legs of an old <br />homeless woman <br />sprawled on the sidewalk. His foot <br />not clearing her arm, caught, <br />so that he jerked her body <br />while a consciousness <br />almost found her but didn't, <br />just stirred somewhere below her face. <br />In the spiral where he turned he glanced <br />not at the woman but to see who'd seen. <br />He saw me watching him, jack-lighted and drawn <br />into the warm ceremony that fell through him. <br />I understood this explosion, <br />the burn from the beginning, <br />there when a bus passes, or a waiter <br />quietly puts down your check. <br />He could be my brother, <br />have parents at home in Ohio where there is a small lie <br />buried in a garden with snow peas and basil. <br />There may be another breaking the soil, <br />dogs who bark into the woods, <br />constellations who see our freeways as spines-- <br />or he may miss a warm climate, <br />groves of oranges measuring the circular <br />scent of weight each time a heavy fruit falls. <br />He may know that secretly <br />the hearts of children conspire to stop <br />when parents close their bedroom doors. <br />But in this construction, <br />the pace that takes him back and forth <br />in the servitude of strangers, <br />he has forgotten, again, to feel for me, <br />eating alone, a woman familiar <br />deep in the eyes, <br />with his same knowledge of movement <br />that bends us forward, <br />the instinct of our heels <br />ready to turn against that jerk a body makes <br />even in dead sleep, <br />the stir that is less than we ask for, <br />less than an old woman, <br />or a woman growing old.<br /><br />Ruth Ellen Kocher<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/he-dreams-of-falling/
