At the Poetry Reading

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s

wife’s legs—they’re so much more

beautiful than anything he might

be saying, though I’m no longer

in a position really to judge,

having stopped listening some time ago.

He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop

and can therefore get along fine

without my attention. He started in

reading poems about his childhood—

barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,

that sort of stuff—the loss of

innocence he keeps talking about

between poems, which I can relate to,

especially under these circumstances.

Now he’s on to science, a poem

about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying

to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.

Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining

myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,

rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-

stockinged legs, imagining them arched

around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.

My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!

He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,

leaves him for another poet, perhaps,

the observant, uninnocent one, who knows

a poem when it sits down in a room with him.