His new heaviness he inhabits
all the way to the fingertips,
as if lunch were a rehearsal

for something more filling than supper.
The hammy hands flutter,
butterflies in the subtropical winter.

Though he’s wangled a table by the window,
he never checks his profile. No longer blond,
no longer pretty, no longer cast

as the German soldier in Italian films,
he has retired, he says. Moved back
to the state where he was born,

son of a slow-moving river and a Southern nymph.
He’s on his way to visit her grave,
she who wore a fur coat to his football games,