Doored in Front of Martyr’s

by ADRIEN SOBOL

I fly, skylights gawking,
skinned into traffic
   like my bloody freewheel 
launched into the air first five 
      then ten feet
   then a woman walks out 
of the bar holding a ladder and a drink.

She climbs and cranes 

      her highball.
You look like you 
need it more, she says.
Thanks, I say and sip.
I think I can walk it off, I tell her, 
   floating now 
   some sixty stories high. 
She smiles. I’m falling 
      in love already. 

I try to tell her my number, 
how I’m a poet
      how I enjoy
deprecating myself in postcards 
from faraway places,
but she’s grown small,
a dapple on Lincoln, and me,  
a mouthful of stratosphere, 
passing like some nimbus over the lake. 

      another romance over, 
I think, before we can kiss in Ibiza
before we can undress each other
   on horseback
   before we can build a life 
   boat from the remains 
   of our shipwrecked baby grand…

   I’m somewhere in orbit 
trying to imagine her name, when I notice
the Sun rising, shaking its head.
‍      ‍You’re going to write a poem
about this, the Sun says, aren’t you?
Well, don’t put me in it. I want
nothing to do with your works of art. You’re
no good at it, whatever you’re doing, it’s lousy.

      But it’s too late—
Forgive me, I tell the Sun—because this poem, 
      for all its faults, like the chasm
      of my personality, 
         is already complete.