A Romance

I saw a child set down her binder like a wall through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk— and from that moment was in love:Oh theft. College was supposed to straighten me like a bent tree strangled by a wire, but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat. How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap, a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass to be snatched in an instant and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks. Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living. A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny, a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat, small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse where it falls off the breasts like a woodland rive with a limestone amphitheater underneath. Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape— with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French. We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives though we did not have the choke adjusted yet. Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag bloating up with facts. Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red, slab thudding from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table, and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.