Your legs were too skinny for your shorts

The day you walked into the room, your cotton shirt

About to billow, as if it could, on the unseen zephyr of your shoulders:

No one saw the half-smile like a pale pink watermelon slice,

Wrapped in bounce-ready plastic and exhumed on a foam plate,

That played the piccolo about your twenty-four (now) aligned teeth.

There was sand in a glass box on the shelf

Between blue books and a candle holder—both carpeted in fabric.

I had thought that perhaps a pterodactyl had been born again,

Ready for man’s last supercilious vapid idyll,

Hair parted into the patterns of a folded handkerchief

And wings disguised as hesitant and tranquil wrists,

But only your Adam’s apple gave it away.

The skin about it was too much like terciopelo velvet,

Undiscovered by narrow faces and rivercopious eyebrows looking

To find fault with the tightest of stone walls.

Music there was none, lights there were all;

Intrigued by the night, you breathed on the blackened window

And crossed your ankles, ready for the great green vision

Of spectral lightning, while the rest of saw low-cut, paper star, creaseless, impertinent, perfect

White socks.