Full of juice and ready for use,
A boy one-fourth my age
tells his friends. When in doubt,
whip it out, advises another
whose face I cannot see.
I have left my keyboard, unable
to shepherd onto the page
my thoughts. On this melting
August night, I have crossed
three Missoula streets, anxious
to trade the snafu of words
for the safety in numbers
and a Dairy Queen sundae.
Behind me in the queue, two girls,
whose fish scale eye shadow
does not age them, lament
a good love gone bad.
He’s a pig, says the pretty one,
the kind that seldom speaks first.
They’re all pigs, affirms her friend
who looks at me embarrassed
for voicing a truth she thinks
I may have never known.
I want to tell these girls to stow
their anger, that they’re right,
of course, we are all pigs,
but that this is not insult
but affirmation, that there lies

in every man’s heart hope,
not humility, to still stir women
in serendipitous ways.
Rather than order a sundae
I likely won’t finish, I want to tell
these two why the wild boar

rushes headlong into the thicket
each time he glimpses rustling,
his instinct of hope more primal
than pride. This is why the boys
who carry like luminaries
the same dipped cones pause,
the bolder ones, to eye girls too old
and too wise to them, girls they
know are beyond their reach, before returning the attention of their selfish tongues
to the immediacy of their desserts.
I wait until the boys retreat
to their bicycles that rest on a knoll
and the girls resume twining
their long, straight hair, wait
until they are beyond earshot before
I explain the difference between us:
The boy scouts, but the girl guides.
It’s not the wand; it’s the magician.
I never knew my second wife.

- Michael Darcher