for Robert Sanchez

All day he finds the long, black hairs

in the washing machine, coiled

around the oven knobs, in the mustard

of his sausages and kraut . . .

He thinks to whom might they belong—

someone he’s loved (or obsessed over, confusing

it for love), or someone he’s known

casually, had met him at a party, gazing

over a keg; perhaps between the aisles of the supermarket;

in the dim flickers of light at the Cineplex. He

needs to know so he searches through photo albums,

piles them on the floor, one after the other, holding

the strands against black-cropped heads, using

the magnifying glass for closer comparison, but no luck.

He opens the phone book, dials numbers, names A-Z—

describes the hairs, entangles them and describes the helixes,

the knots and shadows—

how each strand thickens and thins

like a snake’s tail only in the softest light.

Who has hair like that? he asks.

No one knows.

He is in fits of frustration

and pulls his hair out.

People call him crazy, even at the haberdashery

as he sorts the piles and piles of hats,

attaching strands inside the brim, picturing

how “his” hair might flow from there

like a shadow against the forehead.

He runs to the store-keep, eyes blood-shot, panting

and sweating and asks him for names, clues, but receives

only a blank stare, as if he has fabricated the whole thing—

as if there is a chance the hairs are merely the light

catching a scratch in the machine, on the oven . . .

He leaves the shop lion-muscled, but not of heart—

for grief pitches stones against his heart

as if it were an abandoned house.

He returns home, to the sites of the hairs, but

they are gone now, and he can’t help but feel

like a man who has lost his lover

after a long illness

and must endure the uninterrupted goings-on

of life the way a man who lies

in bed feels warmth dissipating

from the empty space where a lover never slept,

a lover who was never even there.

D. Antwan Stewart (TX)  is the author of the chapbook, The Terribly Beautiful, which was a finalist in the 2005 Main Street Rag Annual Chapbook Contest. He is a James Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writing. He serves as poetry editor for the Bat City Review.