To smoke on a window ledge

barechested to the afternoon

unseen through sun umbrellas,

the motorcycles tipping

quick toward someplace else, three boys

leaning on bumpers strapping on their stilts

to wobble through the empty park, to fall

unhurt into thick-stemmed safety nets

is no consolation.

To lie beneath the window, late at night,

listening.  The different languages,

the different lips and gutturals,

the girl with the tourmaline anklet,

the kids on ketamine.  How easy

to be down with them, singing out

the night’s universal nonsense,

which, headlong, distractible,

kicks free from memory.

Instead, to wake disoriented

by dreams of that other life – where is it? –

when you still turned to me.  To yearn

for a fool’s pratfall catastrophes

that teach him nothing, leaving him his limbs.

To stare into the sweat-light, darkening

the eastward upraised arms

of rooftop antennas that at this hour

receive no messages.

Peter Kline's poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He is the past recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, as well at the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review. He is currently a guest blogger for the Ploughshares blog.