Mission Thief

Forrest Gander

Picking up

toward evening, bay breezes

cool The Mission and

fuchsia petals plop onto

slabs of root-tilted sidewalk,

local tectonics we maneuver,

you and I fecund with our

renewed vows en route

to La Cumbre with its Aztec

mural and gorditos—beside us

at the curb, its windows opaque,

a black seventy-five Cadillac

rocks high up and drops

back on pneumatic shocks, a whiff

of carne asada, poles

mummified with posters: Has Visto

Este Niño/ Thrash Polka at Slims—

while

five blocks away

the imminent lays its egg

in the eye of evening and what

begins as tenderness

will end in Calvary

whose devotion

can I claim

to aim wholly at you if holding

your hand even so my eyes

swivel to see the woman at her door

with dim desire or is it

nostalgia finally, mere registration,

an animal impulse

tightens the solar plexus

invisible to us three blocks away

a white-haired Asian man,

the collar of his jacket

stained with sweat,

leans on his bicycle, all he owns,

against the pharmacy wall while

a panhandler puts down

his bagged bottle

by the lightpost and watches

you reach for

my hand as we cross Dolores I spit

sidewise into my shadow

when you aren’t looking

the monitor on a stool outside

the Mission Revival plays a live feed

of the sermon within

a bleak scene few men

one child about twelve

sweaty preacher’s sthenic rant

dressed well

a parishioner slips out

through front doors but before

they close, one another—one

of us, the casual assembly of voyeurs—

ushers herself in;

so water evaporating

from treetops tugs water through leaf

which draws water through xylem

up the trunk from roots maybe

when one escaped

the other was sucked inside like that

who will rescue her

not I and not a nervous drunk

eyeing the seat bag and full-rack panniers

of a bike against the wall

we do not see

the man the panhandler steal the bike

but other can

two sparrows titter in fescue

on the traffic island

where we continue

to stroll in urban intimacy

a tuned rhythm of synced steps

mark us a couple

a couplet on the page of scrawled noise

men sawing pavement at the corner

thick rap bass thumping

from open cars a Harley

growls around Guerrero

Mexican songs at the café we pass

a splash of Mandarin washes over

the protected inlet of our taking-it-in

we’re quiet as urchins feeding on algae

fallen from stalks of kelp

only at the crossing only through horizons

with roses for sale, approaching the pair

eating at a curbside table,

an ink-haired Guatemalan girls in a red dress

her shyness sits at the edge of their plates like a fly

the bicycle thief wobbles our way

long strips of stratus make it

a worthwhile sunset I stumble and

catch the swing phase of your walk

erotic your left foot pigeon-toed

hips narrow as a boy’s

what is that smell in the alley

fennel urine and two starlings

their wings scissored behind them

like thoughtful rabbis walking

I used to imagine strangers naked

you say now I imagine them

in coffins the back of our hands touch

you squeeze my wrist the body

ambiguously subject and

object a dog tied to a fireplug sneezes

the old man passing by says Bless you

a little sordid and still warm leftover

flan-yellow of day remains

before what they once called civil-dark

when it grew too dim to work and

the ice man with his iron-scorpion

dragged to a kitchen his last block

already the future is cued up and closing in

the thief pedaling though we have not seen him

when you turn

your face to ask me if

Mexicans call hummingbirds colibrí

or chupaflor flower-sucker the vibrant fading

light reveals moth-egg bumps beneath your eye

we suppose we invent this privacy

the privilege to brim with each other

as though our rillet might be

deduced from the mainstream

as if we were stirred

together past mere propinquity

the warm familiar

rapture I assume you feel

with me and I rub my tongue

to prickles in my throat

foretell a cold and step back

to the brink

of thee, smudged

newspaper print where

fingers brushed your nose

at once we sense a commotion ahead

faces by one like cards

when a bet is called

flip their open expression

toward us

what is happening

hurtles our way in shouts shouts

bottleneck to the lip of where we stand

alert as though a knife had tapped a glass

I see the man on bicycle

under a neon taquería sign only at 

the crossing only through horizons between

someone yells something inarticulate

almost to us

he is racing

recklessly up the sidewalk startled

pedestrians jump aside

already plummeting

from prospective to present

his counterpoint

divorcing you from me

from the rhythm of our tangency

I lurch and cannot feel yet and fail to rise

into the revision

of circumstance as though

I tumbled from stairs

to a spotlit stage where you were

cut off from me by the light

a sidewalk of strangers

severed from concerns that seconds prior

perfectly contained them

waylaid and yielding their leads

for the role of audience

the drama hurrying on its way

the head of event expanding

the dark head of event crowning before us

its intensity

full bore and as the thief nears

our end of the block it isn’t yet

clear what is happening someone yells

an indecipherable whinny of alarm

the immediate stamping in its stall

I strain for clues in the turned

expectant faces the many

misconstrued bodies off balance on pause

to isolate the bicyclist in his singular

tumult he who supplants

you who makes

his claim greater on me

he himself

custodian now of this present in which

against inertia I strain to act

but

how quickly he penetrates

the blister of my regard

from which you’ve been

extracted as the world goes quiet

handlebar and rear-rack panniers

swinging side to side half

standing on pedals whose

wild joggling wide-wet eyes urge

No no don’t stop me

I grab for his arm as your hand

stays in mine and

from an infinite

distance I recall you

your presence

blows in, a red petal,

three of us

pooling our volitions

you tug my shirt

my hand slaps his neck half-

assed scuffle my

knuckles scrape the stucco wall

as he flails

at me I can hear

but whom do I hear?

my failure

all along to recognize

your full weight and solidity

you say No

the word rings and through the ring

a thin scarf of disapproval

draws across my still vague intent

awkward in the struggle

to hold him to judge what

effort to make with whom

am I thrashing

a question mark for a backbone

my hand touches his shoulder

so tentative and slowly

the gesture might be taken

by those watching

for an act of deputation

he stiff-arms and brushes me off

and I turn on my heel

like the other

spectators, a pure stare

now a singularity uncoupled once again

that readily from you like the dissolving glow

of a clicked-off light

the floater behind a closed eye

and so combined elements

on the stalk of an instant

unpetal their parts in wind

a hand bleeding a man on bicycle

a murky sense of restraint which is you here

next to me but across the caesura

the rent stanza in our accord

what I am cracks into two acts

one replays the scene

revising it toward

some salvific end and

the other gauges

the thief’s increasing

distance from me

instinctively as when flying

I measure the gap

from jet to ground

with an image of my body falling

he veers to the street

and a hard pant

spins me to see

a white-haired man

in a slow-motion run

slather of mucus under

pigeon-hole nostrils, his gaze

nailed ahead at the crossing

my eyes put on his face

his mouth a gasping rictus

as he plods past

never to catch

what

lulled on routine and self

and casual neglect I let slip

rooted in place around me

a block of storefronts and trees

a man on foot falling farther behind

and one on bike and

the rest of us unrescued

stopped in time transfixed

to this stark spectacle of our separateness

making it stand

hammering its horizons home

behind which each of us says I don’t know

who you are

you never broke through me

the key makes no sound

when you go to play

the world shifts

along a hairline crack

you can’t tell

what is happening

until it moves on and is gone as

someone and someone’s grief careen

around a corner