MARINA GIPPS (Chicago, Illinois)

It was a man who disappeared and came back again;
somewhere in a dream, blinded by obscurity.
A man who walked in, sat down, throwing his coat
to the ground as the elves shook below the seat cushions.
A man who was too busy to love me; a man yet not a man
but a disappearance; deeply obscure in his sexual demeanor.
On computers, tracing the pantylines of magazines
too numerous to mention. This man, i knew, but did not know
And so i came to be: alone and walking. Not thinking much
of today, the day i met him, some years ago. And so the years
crept up urchinlike: the man growing old only to be a man
blinded by his own folly. And i, blinded by my own.