|
|
Kate Benedict
reads
Glimpses of the Body at a City Window
in Real Audio format.
|
 |
Mine is not a building with a river view.
No park outside my window changes hue
with the successive seasons. If I crane,
I see chaotic traffic, and a fire lane.
Shades shield me from the urban mess.
If now and then I raise them, it's to guess
the weather, not to linger at the sill.
Still, one day I lingered against my will.
Across the street, I saw a man, a very
old man, naked in his room. A terry
towel—gray, perhaps once white—glided past
his hips. He bent, and his momentous ass
hovered above the avenue. Vast, pink—
he bore his great weight gently to the brink
of that too public sill. His wife helped him dress.
He put up with each capable caress.
Were they not mindful of the spectacle
they made, he in his enormous shackle
of slack skin, she in her intimate act
of wifely duty? Their street-show lacked
self-consciousness or shame. Uninhibited
as infants, pure, free, they exhibited
his old exquisite body and were proud.
It wouldn't have surprised me, had they bowed.
Nor did it surprise me when the scene would play
again on other days, or that I'd stay
by the window, riveted to the floor,
or that in time their figures came no more.
|
|
|
