LEGS
by Joseph Harker
A man walks into the cafe on a Pair Of Legs.
These are the kind of legs that demand metaphor:
legs drifting in like the masts of capsized ships,
legs like walnut saplings in the churchyard.
What is it about a pair of legs that enchants a person?
Or any body part: for he also has arms, knuckles,
upper lip, cropped nape, but it’s the legs that get me.
His legs resist like longbows. Running shorts show
one bronze, fresh-mowed leg with Hebrew tracery
tattooed round the thigh. What’s “nice legs”
in Hebrew? How do you compliment a stranger’s legs
without sounding strange? I know the legs of women
are up for constant debate, the apparition of their legs
traded on the commodities market by leg-men
whistling as they dig the street, knowing good legs
and thinking they’ve something to prove. Legs, though,
have never inspired me until These Legs. I was never
a vulgar leg-admirer hooting at the passerby.
Can one man worship the legs of another, lay kisses
on the saintly knees? And why couldn’t legs be
that once-in-a-lifetime quality? Well-legged can mean
marriageable. Good legs make men dependable,
worldly, and these legs could be wandering monuments,
sculptural as they are. I feel I am discovering legs
for the first time. I’m seeing legs, legs, suddenly
I am judging everyone by the curve of their legs,
sitting here shaking at the injustice of subpar legs,
of overgrown and shapeless legs milling about
this man with Dead Sea Legs as he stands, stretches,
pays for his coffee, scratches his one tattooed leg,
that alphabet leg!, flexing and spinning him away
like a gyroscope, out the door, his Legs gone and him
gone with them.
"LEGS" by Joseph Harker reprinted without permission from his blog Naming Constellations entry dated 7/19/2013
-----please see:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/...3.0/deed.en_US -----
(I'll note that the writer claims he wrote this one for fun and tried to fit the word leg(s) into every line)