I bought a bag of hard green pears today.
I came home and sat in our room
listening to music for hours,
solo piano, things from France, from the beginning
of the century.
When we were very young, your forgiveness
humiliated me. I knew
you would be asleep when I got back.
Male Beauty
Richie Hofmann
Richie Hofmann is the author of a collection of poems, Second Empire, and the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His poems have appeared recently in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Believer. A 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.