You are not Margaret Atwood
I was not inflamed one bit.
In the median of Colorado Boulevard and some other quick running avenue in downtown Denver, while waiting for the glowing white man to appear and bid me cross in safety, I was met by a hobo, a panhandler, a stranger.
He wanted the same things I did.
He was blond and dirty blond with a face that might have been sweet if it hadn't spent such time coupling with the sunshine, abraiding itself and eroding itself. Maybe it might have been sweet a long time ago when he was in school and they were telling him his mother was no good. I guess that's when it fixed a little harder and the pins fell from his lips and smiling was an act of congress forever in recess.
Was he a mountain man? He spoke some other language, dialect of the Other, and it was glassy but wrapped in paper. A broken neon sign speech all dressed up and shot through a grate in spitted nouns and disjointed syllables.
He was wrapped in dirty clothes you couldn't smell except for up close.
He drew up close, forever patting himself down. He wasn't sure he was here either. He wasn't sure there was enough shape to make the both of us. The smell was of small places unseen, the seep was the smell, and you could only imagine the source: coffins of dead birds, rodentia, orange blossoms, sealed-up crawl spaces where rules the silverfisher king, an icechest of spoiled egg flavored with spoiled beef.
He was not all there. Maybe he was in parts in Virginia, parts in New Mexico. He had seen things I only imagined: sickenings of the cattle, the death of his mother when he came home on the school bus, her body just there on the porch like a gift he could claim for the next thirty Christmases, fists raised against him, the surge of Whitman once or twice in his sleep, the plant he tried to grow on the road, mice running their little feet over his sleeping body, the control pulled from him by little filaments Hercules could not rip in twain. The faces of the girls who will not look him in the eye
"You are so pretty." Those thin guppy lips wriggled out.
I did not look him in the eye.
He lifted his hand up and touched my shoulder and instead I laughed. He pulled away like the laugh made his whole life absurd.
"No, no, real - ly." The space between syllables was just long enough to be threatening. It had to be taken, it had to be a conversation, he still had his words.
"Uh, thanks." Is what I said and tried to will the light to turn. It was nice to be pretty to someone who saw so much concrete. People who saw color thought less of me. Here, I was a dance of two or three veils and that was fine, that was fantasy, that was enough to set alight.
"Do you want to get married?"
"No, thanks." Is what I answer as if a proposal is equal to request for change. I pop that balloon as soon as it begins to rise up off the ground. He wanted us to live under the bridge, maybe in Auraria, wash in the stream, someone to run with, to pat his head, shut him up when he ran too long. He was telling me our ships were crossing in the night. He was telling me he'd heard the song, the weepinandawailing, and he didn't think he was long for this earth, he was telling me it was hard to be alone. He was revealing a philosophy in the question, he was showing his scars. He was more than what I saw, there were virtues in the body if there were weaknesses in the mind. He had so many dreams. He would fit the bill. It was simple. We were here together.
We wanted exactly the same things.
But I waved goodbye like the elevator door had opened and our time together was so obviously finished and crossed the street and went to lunch.
