August in West Hollywood
All day I watch the neighbor's boy
paint the side of his house.
He seems to rest so easily on the ladder rungs,
shirtless, lanky-limbed, hips tilting in the sun.
In the morning, I am the house, blueing beneath
his brushstrokes,
each rib a shingle, my breast, windowpanes, my
waist,
the broad wood planks flattening beneath his
brushstrokes,
my shoulders, shutters, lips and eyelashes flutter-
ing eaves.
By four, I'm the roller brush,
turned and turning in his working hands.
Come dusk, I'm the open pail of paint
beside him on the grass - wide-mouthed, emptied.
The neighbor's house breathes in its new skin
beneath the streetlamp.
It puts its face to the darkness and does not reco-
nize itself.
Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau's poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Painted Bride Quarterly, New York Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mudfish, Spoon River Poetry Review, Salamander, Gulf Cost and Midwest Quarterly, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Loyola Marymount University.