You ask me how it all began. It began

with something unattainable. I fell in love

with an older man. He must have been

fourteen.

His legs were strong. I know this because

he practised cycling every evening, upside down

in the window opposite, and I pined.

Across the street in Pollokshields,

I pined for the boy whose pale legs pumped

and pumped against the dark,

the boy whose name I never knew,

Alan or David or John.

Something about the intimacy of windows, mine

looking into his, his looking into mine:

it never occurred to me when I was nine, but over time

I began to hope for a sighting, watch the black space

until it offered up the gift, the round white face

and then the socks and the legs, the windmill legs

of the boy without a name whom I named

William or Robert or James.

I lay in wait for the sound of his front door,

and before he reached his gate I’d be down the stairs

and out in time to cross his path, red hot under the skin,

but of course he never looked at me and I never looked

at him and I walked past casually, past

Colin or Donald or Sam.