Paul Hoover
FORTUNE
Someone swift
will enter your slow life.
He is everything
you have forgotten,
the gathering of muscles
you never used.
He is what you thought you saw,
but blinked away, the sum,
plus one, of missed glances.
You are thin.
He is thinner.
You are strong.
His rungs are broken
like his footsteps
climbing into you.
Horizons are the white unravelings
heaped on the plate
where he eats half your food.
In his room
the curtains are stacked
in tight white squares
on each side of the windows.
In yours
the red part of the pear
faces the keyhole.
Perhaps you are something
he just remembered,
the twitch that wakes him up in church .
Perhaps you are snow
building up over a sliderule.
When you are the act of falling
he is the vertigo that came just before
rising like a feather to tickle
that worn spot on the ledge
where you were standing.
