The Perfect Stranger
He saved my baby's life, then just walked away. He was
a perfect stranger. He still is.
—at the scene of the fire
for Patricia, eventually
No one knows how he makes his way in this imperfect world.
He doesn't have a come-on, a gimmick, or a pitch—
to say nothing of a proper name he'll own up to.
He's so good at whatever he does, it calls for no introduction.
His face is a composite of every low profile he's kept.
No perfect likeness will ever be sold as a bobblehead figurine.
He has no identifying marks. He'll never be caught dead
standing out in a crowd. If he sits down next to you at the bar,
the last thing on his mind is where have you been all his life.
He can't be out looking for that kind of trouble.
But should he come across the purse you left behind in a hurry,
you'll find it at the door in the morning, everything inside
perfectly intact, without a note of explanation. It's already more
than he really wanted to know: who you are and where you live.
By now he's in a rush of his own, all but disappearing
into one more day's white noise. But he'll be there
under a third-story window when the smoke starts pouring out
and a mother drops her baby down as softly as she can pray.
By noon he'll be at the courthouse, posting bail after unlikely bail.
His afternoons a quintessential walk in the park—
he'll have some CPR to give. A Professor-of-Humanities Chair to endow
at a school that's gone MBA-crazy. Maybe he'd say it's nothing,
really, if only he felt like talking. What else does he have to do
except to show up where he's so completely unexpected?
It's never going to be his day to drive the office carpool.
He won't be counted on, looked forward to.
Statistically speaking,
we're usually strangers ourselves, and I don't know how in the world
some days most of us are nothing if not civil to each other.
But the perfect stranger would seem to be another matter entirely.
Sometimes in his sleep he dreams up secret imperfections:
he's washing whites with colors. Forgets to turn off the lights.
Or there's a knife stuck deep in the toaster again,
mud on the dress boots or blood in the sink,
the wrong-size spoon stirring quietly in the soup.
His bid for a perfect game is spoiled by a 3-2 pitch in the dirt.
But who's he kidding? When he wakes up, there's not a chance
in hell those things will happen.
When I woke up today I thought
of him sitting down for breakfast, bending over a plate of eggs
cooked, of course, to perfection. And I was strangely relieved
to think he might be out there somewhere, carrying the ball
for everyone who can't quite measure up. But then again
he doesn't have anyone like you to lie down next to,
his concentration so utterly blown on a regular basis.
Surely you must know by now how often you're the reason
for these imperfect words—even when it doesn't seem that way
at first. But notice how, just four lines up, a perfect stranger
led me back to you. And he'll be out of here soon enough.
This poem actually began so long ago, it's not funny anymore.
Before the perfect stranger came to me, I was working hard
on the Moon, sweating out some Space-Race-paranoia epic, or so
I supposed. But even on the Moon I couldn't stop myself from saying
sometimes it's hard to tell apart the two extremes of love—
the giddy weightlessness, the stubborn sense of gravity. And then I said
we're better off not trying.
Down here the view's no less breathtaking,
and you and I get it mostly right in the long bed of our life together,
some days especially beautiful for the flaws that show up there:
how you make off to the other side with the blankets in your sleep.
How I often talk in mine, resorting to the future-perfect tense—
maybe tomorrow, next week, or more surprising years from now,
I will have learned, finally, to believe it when you tell me
I'm the only less-than-perfect one for you. That much still
could happen. But no doubt that's another poem completely.
And whenever I wake up that absolutely uncovered,
there's no way to pretend that we don't see
you're about to get what you've had coming all along.
That would be me, so excited that somehow I'm still flying
the flag you were raising over and over in my dream.
And I've got the whole day to explain, if I have to. Nowhere else
I'm unexpected. I already know by heart exactly who you are
and where you live and how we're about to fit together
pretty damn well, if not perfectly, one more time.