It is like plum custard at the heart of a steel girder,
cool malted milk in a hot bowling ball.
It's glimpsed sometimes when a man coos to a puppy.
If his wife moves softly, it may flutter like a hermit thrush
into the bedroom, and pipe its pure, warbling tune.
Comment, though, and it's a moray jerking back into its cave.
My dad taught me to hide tenderness like my "tallywhacker"---
not to want or accept it from other men. All I can do
for a friend in agony is turn my eyes and, pretending
to clap him on the back, brace up his carapace with mine.
So, when you lean across the table and extend your hand,
your brown eyes wanting only good for me, it's no wonder
my own eyes glow and swell too big for their sockets
as, in my brain, dry gulleys start to flow.
Charles H. Webb worked as a rock singer and a psychotherapist before landing at CSU Long Beach where he is a Professor of English. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry, 1995. He edited Stand up Poetry: The Anthology, and co-edited Grand Passion: The Poetry of Los Angeles. His book Reading the Water won the 1997 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and will be published this fall by Northeastern University Press.