The Stripper

Like fish surfacing from the long limousine

of streaming underwater currents, late afternoon

she appears at the pool mysteriously, flashing

the free-spending sun off men who turn helplessly

iridescent before her nakedness.

I have watched her discreetly, all summer long,

carefully,

past what I take to be the usual shock and excitement

over closing in so quickly on what takes me so long

to imagine.

Then scrupulously, clinically, I wait for what feels like

something minute and impossibly toxic to crystallize

between us.

It'll take five years before her body softens and ripens

into the normalcy of the Kansas stock she comes

from,

lying there, legs splayed, contemptuous and bored

with her

lavishly adored body which I imagine has nightly

pumped dry

the grunts of anonymous drunks on the rank mud

flats of desire.

She has no idea how tender, attentive, and

appreciative

I could be, what an accident of luck it is to have such

a body,

which she oils with unguents so slowly and

luxuriously that I feel

luck rise through me all the way up here. Today it

feels like we've been

married for years, that I've ended up bankrupt by her

demand on me.

So I've become cruel, turning her body over and over

in my mind,

coolly grading my stunning lascivious jewel by its

imperfections.

Each day after nap time I come down and execute my

perilous pass,

the formal, balding older gentleman from apartment

2B, who exchanges

dismissive looks with her. Today she has no idea I've

decided to risk

everything I've fantasized (then step to her aid at the

last minute)

as I march by shadowing her daydream with a

complexly fashioned

"Pardon me" on my way to lodge an anonymous

complaint with the manager.