I Open A Beer, A Car Approaches

and I'm falling in love again. Today
with the air conditioner

as it dissects a nest of sparrows
and breathes a mist of down into the room.

I spent the morning thinking
what I should tell my wife,

about what I read yesterday that makes me
want to sell every blue shirt I own.

The full moon is like a cliché, a festered wound
on the horizon; a helicopter distracts the stars

rising above the parkway traffic. . . .
A screen door hisses shut, below this window

the oak and birch bend in air I can't feel.
A knock, then another at the neighbor's door

just as five truck tires crush the life
out of a squirrel crossing Midland Ave. The girls on bikes

coast past a boy weeping, I don't want a haircut.
I like my hair, as his father punches a doll.

Curtis Bauer's recent publications include Rivendell, Illuminations, and The Cortland Review. He was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award, The GSU Review Poetry Prize, and The Glimmer Train Poetry Open and won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize for his manuscript Fence Line, which will be published by BkMk Press in Fall 2004.