In the Plaza by Louise Glück

In the Plaza

For two weeks he’s been watching the same girl,

someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe,

drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head

bent over a magazine.

He watches from across the square, pretending

to be buying something, cigarettes, maybe a bouquet of flowers.

Because she doesn’t know it exists,

her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination.

He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her

in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft,

a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south.

Soon she will recognize him, then begin to expect him.

And perhaps then every day her hair will be freshly washed,

she will gaze outward across the plaza before looking down.

And after that they will become lovers.

But he hopes this will not happen immediately

since whatever power she exerts now over his body, over his emotions,

she will have no power once she commits herself—

she will withdraw into that private world of feeling

women enter when they love. And living there, she will become

like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world;

in that sense, so little use to him

it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.