The most surprising word in the opening line of Mike Stone's "Pretty Girls" is not "pretty" but "homesick." Homesickness is normally a longing for somewhere you have been. Here it is triggered by strangers, and the poem explains why with a careful "as though": the speaker feels *as though* he had been born into "a world of beauty and love" and then "exiled to a country full of ugliness and despair." He does not claim this is true, only that beauty makes him feel it. The central idea follows from that: attraction is partly a form of nostalgia, a sense of missing something we may never have owned. The poem then wonders whether love or time is to blame for the gap.
The construction is loose and conversational. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the line lengths swing widely. The first line is short, plain and almost offhand, and "pretty" is a deliberately light word. The fourth line stretches out and stacks its abstractions in balanced pairs, "beauty and love" against "ugliness and despair," like two columns of a ledger. The slight, casual trigger and the enormous reaction make the speaker's feeling seem both startling and slightly comic.
The next two lines form a small stanza of their own: "There is a bridge over my loneliness / But it goes from nowhere to nowhere." Loneliness becomes a gap or river, and the bridge suggests help is at hand. Then "But" cancels it. A bridge with no banks is a joke and a grief at once, and the deadpan delivery keeps it from sounding self-pitying. A quieter echo is worth hearing: "despair," "nowhere" and the later "where" share the same vowel-and-r ending. When the poem finally asks "Where are you," it feels as if the nowhere of the bridge has turned into a question.
The middle stanza widens the view. The speaker is "drawn toward a newborn infant's breathless cry / And an old man's breathless chortle." The repeated "breathless" shifts meaning between the two. The baby is gasping at its first air, and the old man's laugh is running short of it. The word also reminds us of what beauty does to us, since being struck by a pretty face leaves us breathless too. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is pulled toward the two ends of a life, the beginning and the end, as if both stood closer to "home" than the middle where he is stranded. The cry and the chortle are also sounds rather than sights, and they come as a relief after the poem's abstract nouns.
Then comes its strangest image: "Whose arrow is this in the dirt, / Time's or Cupid's?" The arrow is spent and fallen, and nobody is coming back for it. Cupid's arrow is desire, and "time's arrow" is the one-way direction in which everything ages. The poem asks which of them struck the speaker and never answers. The suggestion, though, is that they may be the same arrow, because the sharpest ache of desire is the awareness that youth and beauty pass. "Dirt" keeps the image low and earthly, and perhaps hints at the grave, though that is an inference rather than something the poem says.
The ending turns away from the girls altogether: "Where are you / My missing muse?" Suddenly the poem is about writing as well as longing. The speaker addresses the figure who should turn all this feeling into verse, and she is absent. The "m" sounds of "my missing muse" also recall the first line's "make me," so the poem ends on the same soft hum it began with. The muse might be one of the pretty girls, or the lost home itself, and the poem does not choose.
What makes it significant is how much it fits into so few lines. The bridge leads nowhere, the arrow has no owner and the muse is missing, and these three images of broken connection all come from one ordinary moment of noticing someone beautiful. Stone leaves them unresolved and ends on a question, which suits a poem about longing for something it cannot name.