Man whose wife is blind

There is a man I know who watches
through the windows of cafes
He makes a busy market of
This place they call the strip
He makes it his Lido
With a constant screening
Of stories

He’s not lonely, only curious, the way
a dog sniffs every foot of the hedge

He wears an old corduroy coat
with leather buttons
But no cap

His hair is wavy and wild: little boy hair

The broad glass of the window is not a curtain
But a stage
Candles make a jigsaw within
The rattle of words tumbling like skittles
Rising and falling like smoke
reluctant to leave a jar

A man and a woman, restlessly silent
Wearied lovers?
Two men with crow’s eyes and too full lips
A table of boysy youth, all helium bravado
Parents with a shy daughter, and perhaps a brother
Or a friend (boyfriend would be too explicit for sex
is not served with parental consent before the age of thirty)

Couples incline like conspirators
He catches the way her hand stretches suddenly
like a skittering pony across the menu to touch his neck
lingeringly

A girl-woman retakes her seat next to her boy-man
Because she kisses him, he makes a circus of the possession
plastered to his cheeks

Beetles move among them, young and weary, holding pads
Threading the tables into episodes

The woman at the outside table, lips tangoing with a cigarette,
fingers busy in a rhumba of impatience
all wary eyes and heavy hope

The man…the watcher, the witness, the celebrant
smiles his private smile;

He walks through the intensity of people hurrying
To their table, to their car, home to fuck, to the next bar
hot with need or wet-fevered and inebriated with loss

The man – for I do know him – looks at them kindly
He wishes them the warmth of knowing their own hearts
Make the best companion

He reaches the street sign and turns
His feet find their own way to a door where
his wife of thirty-one years waits,

She smiles at him. Softly he guides her inside
to her chair by the fire

There he gives her his eyes