When the blue dress secretaries on their lunch break

smoke thin menthols, show off their skim milk flesh

almost blue from winter life, I think of my own skin

lonely as a window.  Five stories above

invisible hands raise visible blinds as if hunger could be

filled by the turquoise dress of the midday midweek sky.

A man at the far end of the square scatters bread

for pigeons jostling with wing and throat.

Consider of the special rights of 10th grade boys

who tilted their chairs against the back wall of my class

as if to be far from notice as possible.

And yet they shaved their heads, except for a flame

of hair that wisps like a house fire through the roof,

strands of rage and proof: we, say the fire,

are on fire.  Our youth made plain as the hem

of a dress or a brown bag lunch.  Our inner life opening

the way hotel doors let cold air move from inside out

when you pass, at the right time, in summer.

To be this honest feels impossible for me- there's

a true apology I never manage to get right,

though I practice more every year.   I can't wear

fire on the landscape of my body.  I can't lean

my body that far away from the world.  I know

too much about what I don't know.

The women return to work.  Boys in the back,

look with me for company in quiet longing, 

salvation in glimpses of legs and office buildings. 

Let's give each other permission to imagine

the shifting afternoon light to be a copier's white

strobe flashing as the women stack papers

into neat order, pressing Start again and again.