by Brett Rutherford
He blocked a door
I wished to pass through.
His muscled arm,
sweat-beaded
in August heat,
was not going to budge.
“I see the way you look at me,”
he muttered, unsmiling.
“I’ve heard about you.
I know you want me.” —
“That’s just not so,” I said.
I did not say,
“I’m not like that.”
There was no use pretending.
He flexed his arm; his chest
expanded. “I have
a perfect body. I know
you want to touch it.
“They say, at the gym,
I’m like a Greek statue.
If you saw me naked —
best thing that ever
happened to you.”
Imagining myself
in the aftermath,
black-eyed in an alley,
I said, “No thanks,”
Homeward I went,
circling around and back
to be sure I was not followed.
Drafted and gone
to Vietnam, he returned,
shrapnel in skull, with half
his perfect Greek statue
weak and immobilized.
All I can think of today,
passing among
the plaster casts
of discus throwers and warriors
in the sculpture gallery —
figures even now
I do not dare to touch —
is that long-ago offer,
and my refusal.
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