Light draping its burning breath on brushwork of sentinel trees,
in the mid-afternoon certainty of City Hall’s four bells, their canopy
crescendos and romance rapturously happens: a scandal
of freckle-throated thrushes swallows the only path—
stampeding bipedal, all abiding nature’s evil veil, masked by what
blank faces they bare—and in that post meridiem, I see him;
my husband trusting that, if he falls, my affection will catch him,
lift him, nourish, nurture, and preserve him.
So in a grand charade, I gesture neitherhanded, stroking my pen,
and ink blush to blank leaf these memories rendered instantly of him.
A tramontana tempts me to rise and to deprive him of my presence,
but not northerly enough is its sentence, and not for the necessity of telling
my stay can any tempest suspend or test my glory in describing him;
a triumphal arch of hewn thighs hiding themselves in a skim of fading denim,
each crevice of his milk-warm movement a righting of the wrong by which men
hide their shame at times when nudity would better suit them.
He labours on the balustrade, leaning over granite to place below him
cables conflating his duties with his evasion of my observation of them;
he wears a flag of sky around him—a cerulean heaven draping his Herculean abdomen—
in what could better be construed as an invitation, not a uniform.
As the clock tower transpires, its sandstone lips browning in their end-of-day lap
around the sun, shaking hands sign the quarter-past and my enticing electrician
eyes my conviction—devoted deeply as I am to witnessing fire itself bend—and
all is over in fifteen minutes.
His fame hastens to its dimming, and as I finish my study, a supervisor’s vigilant
soliloquy sounds to relieve him—thus clouds over my desire as it retires in
a celestial collision, and I rise; my lamppost lingering frivolously, languid
as I saunter down an aisle cold-footed: an alleyway a portal freeing my inhibition.
