Angel Garcia’s speaker is “trying to be a good man” even as he finds himself faced with the oldest of temptations.
—
Sudden Downpour
I am trying to be a good man. Yesterday morning,
smoking a cigarette on my front porch, I watched a woman
stand outside, her mouth open to remember the taste of rain.
She was merely the neighbor whose slippers dragged
from her front door to the mailbox, from the mailbox
to her front door, always at twelve pm and in the same
ridiculous bathrobe. But yesterday, in the rain, beneath it,
without her robe, I watched her blouse become a canvas of breasts
and flesh, her nipples darker than I could have ever imagined
and what I felt burned hotter than the tip of a cigarette.
I am trying to be a good man. Now, years later, I have
walked the sidewalks of an entire city, head down, to forget
five minutes of my life. More than my own foolish desire, she
is not mine. Next door, in her bed, I imagine her husband more
than a ghost, the hairs of his chest slipped purposefully between
her small fingers as they sleep. She in her bathrobe, more frayed,
but now open in the late hour, shadows painted over her naked body.
More than my own foolish desire, I am trying to be a good man.
Outside, I smoke a cigarette, and suddenly a downpour. Nothing
more romantic than a smoke in the rain. But perhaps, I am wrong.
***
Editor’s Note: Angel Garcia has published with us before. Check out “Too Much Sky.”
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Photo by scion-cho/Flickr