The Waiting

I waited for you calmly, with infinite patience.
I waited for you hungrily, just short of desperate.

When you came I knew that desperate was unattractive.
I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.

It tried your patience, it made you hungry for a man
who was hungry. I am that man, I said,

but I said it calmly. My body was an ache, a silence.
It could not affirm how long it had waited for you.

It could not claw or insist or extend its hands.
It was just a stupid body, closed up and voracious.

Copyright © 2004 Stephen Dunn All rights reserved
from Margie
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission