Page 43 - WTP VOl.VII#5

Someone I Met at the Party
Stump Borer
No One was there, and I called him over by your name, but it was just like it used to be when you weren’t there. He took his body away with him after letting it make some noises I couldn’t understand, just like you did, with your stout, pale brownish, shiny surface, and your brown tips of the mandibles, and the eyes, and those two marginal spots on your back even darker. You were densely punctuated about the head, from sports activities I think. You might have been cute, if anyone else had actually noticed, but clichéd, with your male radar longer than your too attentive body, and those coarse punctured wings of your imagination still attracted to feminine lights at night. And yes, I have an attitude, but I had a different one then, which you didn’t notice. It was like offering Christmas lights when you still believed in Christmas.
You see, someone I didn’t know was explaining me to someone I didn’t know in the coffee shop I attend to sulk. She didn’t use my name, of course, but she was exactly right when she nailed me for her mousey friend, and when she finally looked at me, this stranger, who seemed to be listening to things I hadn’t said, she shrugged, as if to say, I don’t really know how I know this, and I shrugged, as if to say, Someone like that could be right in front of you, and you wouldn’t notice. Of course, I wasn’t right in front of her, and she did notice, but she thought I was someone different, not the someone she had already explained.
I imagined, after I returned to my dumpy little corner of the world, my children living in the soil, feeding on rotting stumps and roots, spreading and spreading their own children over all of the western part of the United States. I imagined the pang of longing you would get when one of the girls caught your eye in a coffee shop in whichever frontier you think you’re taming now. And I imagined you trying to get to know her, and failing, but this time knowing it. I imagined you taking that failure home with you, where it had lived ever since we met without you even noticing. And now you will have to feed it without even recognizing what it really is.
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