Camouflage

It’s Wednesday which means she sits

in a red sarong. You wait across the room,

young and bow-tied while her glass of merlot

and stuffed tomatoes go untouched like her book,

The Catcher in the Rye. Tomorrow brings

Lolita, the softcover first edition

green as her pantsuit, a bowl of pea soup

slowly losing steam. Despite all this

she condenses to irrelevance

in your life though still obvious

prey for laughter. But when I serve up

that story to guests you hardly smile,

not because you’re embarrassed

at your hand-to-mouth past or piqued

by how obsessed I seem with every fact

about you, your indifference more

a disguise for the act of overlooking

my failure to find anything

about myself worth mentioning.

It’s as if I’d come to dinner naked

and you’d pulled the tablecloth around me.

There’s a grimmer bareness

and sometimes I hide like a child

by turning on the lights. Just sitting there

you’re everywhere like snow

around the snowshoe hare,

generous without even trying.