impatient, while others had eaten
and were leaving, bidding goodbye
to our friends, and among us
stood a pretty young woman, blind,
her perfect fingers interwoven
about the top of her cane,
a flimsy wand pressed to her cheek,
and she was bending forward,
open-eyed, to find the knotted lips
of a man whose disfigured face
had been assembled out of scars
and who was leaving, hurrying off,
and though their kiss was brief
and askew and awkwardly pursed,
we all received it with a kind of
wonder, and kept it on our own lips
through the afternoon.
Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)
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