I sat in my dark of dissolving faith

In the last year of my marriage,
among a hundred other symptoms I wrote a poem called
"The Woman across the Shaft"--she was someone
I never met--she had long bare legs
on a summer night when she answered the phone
in her kitchen and lifted her legs to the table
while she talked and laughed and I tried to listen
from my window across an airshaft between buildings
and watched her legs. I doubt she was beautiful
but her legs were young and long
and she laughed on the phone

while I sat in my dark of dissolving faith

and I tried to capture or contain the unknown woman
in a poem: the real and the ideal,
the mess of frayed bonds versus untouched possibility,
so forth. Embarrassed now
I imagine a female editor
who received "The Woman across the Shaft"
as a submission to her magazine--the distaste she felt--
perhaps disgust she felt--I imagine her
grimacing slightly as she considers writing "Pathetic"
on the rejection slip but instead lets the slip stay blank
and then returns to another envelope
from a writer she has learned to trust,
crossing her long legs on her smart literary desk.

[Mark Halliday {1949- } 'Legs' from Selfwolf]