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Starry-Eyed The homeless man is in love with me. I stand in his kissing distance, us breathing, the sky ceasing and increasing. (Ours will be a brimful, delicate, balancing-a-bowl-of-soup feeling.) Don’t they say commuters are the mothers of the homeless? I must braid his hair, brush off his dust. They say dust is the city’s flour. I will make a dry bread with his dirt. I would like to hold a crust to his lips. Would like to lead him to a vacant lot. To say, Sir, then gesture, This is yours. It’s a house so large that comets wend in and out of its vents. The homeless man is in love with me—ours will be a tiny and dirty and shiny proximity. Doesn’t he raise his hand as if to brush my cheek? They say the riddles of time and space hide in the puddles of a homeless man’s face. I will be gentle. To see what his eyes see of me. To be a picture a distant satellite seizes. For him I will scour that lot with two hands, on one knee. When our child is born and we find him sky-staring we will say, that’s our roof, our beams, our plaster and lighting. Then my dreams will be his. Of lifting the metal roof off a can of soup. Warming a puddle of broth under the stars. In the satellite picture they will see—me with a homeless man who stares with an intensity I take to mean he is in love with me. They will see my head mid-nod, me saying to this man, Please, please—I can be as gentle as you want. 16 ...

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