She looks up and I am foolishly
caught, staring. I smile unassumingly,
meet her gaze steadily across fiction
at good-riddance prices, as if to say
naturally, we are both human, or I
was abstractedly, absently, not at all,
actually, we've met before I think
surely, across friends or acquaintances
briefly or hunting their ice cube tray
mutually, standing in sun or in chill
at The Neighborhood Cinema recently,
probably, I'm being neighborly, this
moment certainly has nothing to do
with how lovely your hair or how simply
it falls from that pin, how it accents
your cheek, truly, stunningly, leopards
and pheasants and partridges, timelessly,
that's how she looks away, knowingly,
she's never seen me before and I'll
never, not ever, mouth gaping foolishly,
mind scraping foolishly, heart breaking
foolishly, foolishly, foolishly, foolishly.

Tom Koontz
The Birminham Poetry Review 1989