What can be said of this happiness?
The bootblack boy on his knees
in the dim of the bar gives himself
completely to the work of polishing,
leaning into the body on the stool
before him, a shirtless and eager man
who’s being mouthed clean.
Around them parts the human dark.
Not much to do with degradation;
the generous bootblack pours
his attention out of his body
—all alertness—into the presence
before him, up the legs, beautiful,
burying his face in the warm cloth
of the lap: completed, receptacle,
recipient, held, filled—
Though it’s hardly passive:
he’s working to relinquish,
giving the seated one pleasure,
releasing his own weight.
They seem to light the gloom
of their corner; together
they make one lamp. And as if
his work were not complete
until it had been seen by another
—labor of the mouth,
art perfected with the tongue—
he turns his face up toward me,
his witness, smiling, though the verb’s
thin for this unshielded triumph
of a face: What’s he conquered?
Distance and dissatisfaction have slipped
from the look he lifts to me,
so that his power might not go
unacknowledged, now that
he is the image of achieved joy.