What Do You Do?

A great poem by a colleague of mine, David Higginbotham. He has an MFA from Georgia State and a Ph.D from Florida State.

“What do you do?”

Foster asks, and she asks with such sincerity
that I am interested too.
I’m listening for what I’ll say, when Voss
sets two highballs on the bar and disappears.

She breaks the condensation’s silence,
catches the surface tension of a newly-formed drop
and walks the water
on her fingertip down the glass.

“Poet,” I lie. “I poet.” Her white shocking smile
is audible above the television, tuned to coverage
of a twenty-four hour toughman contest, fat men
pulling barges through canal locks with their teeth.