It's not mine, and that's why it's sooo gooood...

Tenderness
aaaaStephen Dunn

Back then when so much was clear
aaaaand I hadn’t learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
aaaaI was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone’s head.
aaaaYelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
aaaaI knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
aaaaWe worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
aaaathat to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
aaaaexisting with her
like rain water that’s found its way

underground to water it naturally joins.
aaaaI can’t remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It’s a word I see now
aaaayou must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
aaaait is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
aaaaso softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
aaaato me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
aaaaignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
aaaaa woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us,

I had new hands and new sorrow,
aaaaeverything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.