I See a Man

He has just had sex. I can tell by the way, when he
notices his shadow ahead of him, broad, spilling over both
curbs to the road he is walking down slowly, most of him
wants to stop and, as if remembering, stand briefly at a
kind of attention. He has just had sex, it’s unclear with
whom. It was a man, it was a woman… it was the air, whose
inconveniently wide-apart edges can be all day coming together.
There’s this sense in which it can’t matter- sex being,
for him, any attempt to fill a space in so there’s no room
left, for a while, for what he surely calls a suffering inside
him- that much his brow gives away, his mouth too, designed,
it seems, for delivering lines like Already, as far into
the world as I’ve wanted, I’ve come. He’s thirty, thirty-two -
it’s easy, still, to say a thing like that. Write it down,
even. Call it a poem.

Carl Phillips