accidental arrows

I don't know what to do

she said

and maybe it was a fact

or a story

or something in a book somewhere

she could have heard on the radio

in a wandering song

or watched it fall from the redlined lips

of a famous star decked in sparkle

but she said it with a little shrug

that was totally and deliciously hers

and it undid him

left him tumbling head first down

over concrete stairs and brick walls

up the strands of ivy below her window

around glass doors and along the edges of sidewalk

that let him be by her side

he was a man of bone and sinew

and his sister would claim 

that his heart was solely concerned

with the careful distribution of blood

cautiously. neither in want nor surplus

thats what she would swear

but then she didn't recognize him

that midnight meeting

when with hair disheveled and hands deep in pockets

he whirled past her in a storm of lovers woe

and she walked on with the strange feeling

that that was a man she knew

or had met once

perhaps in a store 

or at a show somewhere

and he did not see her at all

but wandered on in a haze of names and faces

when only one was carved into his consciousness 

and that small little curve of her shoulders

that he could find in Grand Central Station

without a second thought

and on and on in a blur of moments

while she went on her way

with that delightful delicious shrug of the shoulders

and a pearly toothed smile

The world could have watched in wonder

had it not been spinning

from the delicate force 

of a small lift of shoulders 

and a smile that shook the stars