Boy, Stepping from the Shower, a Towel Around His Waist

by Don Hogle

1.

Thirty years after,

you called to apologize,

asked my email address. 

Later, you wrote to tell me

I was “forever entangled”

in your fantasies and dreams. 

You recalled me stepping

from the shower, wet hair,

a towel around my waist. 

You confessed, sometimes

you conjured the image

in bed — with your wife. 

We were just nineteen

when love, like a fish,

swallowed us whole — 

what does anyone know

when he’s caught

in the belly of it? 

2.

A search confirms what I suspected

after a break in our correspondence. 

You are survived: your wife, a son,

a daughter. The boy has your brow. 

I pair a downloaded picture of him

with yours at about the same age. 

He’s bits of you with a better haircut.

I fantasize he finds a forgotten email, 

seeks me out, wants to know

who I am, who I was to you. 

I’d use words from the Stevens

poem you sent me: I was 

his lamplight, I’d tell him.

I fell on his shining pillows. 

3.

A boy stepped from the shower,

wet hair, a towel around his waist,

as unaware as you that you’d infix

his image, like a camera. 

On a bookshelf in his bedroom,

he had a souvenir wooden chest

that closed with a thin metal clasp.

A Boy’s Treasures was stamped 

on the lid. Inside — a chipmunk skin,

arrowheads, sharks’ teeth, a cowrie shell,

and a creased note you wrote him,

unfolded and re-folded many times. 

I kept the chest, its contents lost

long ago. I remember the boy —

the towel around his waist, wet

hair dripping, warm, on his neck.

Don Hogle's poetry has appeared recently in Apalachee Review, Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Pilgrimage, Stone Canoe, South Florida Poetry Journal, and A3 Review and Shooter in the U.K. Among other awards, he won an Honorable Mention in the 2018 E. E. Cummings Prize from the New England Poetry Club.