Like us, he walked every day on the boulevard, the air
a long-legged woman with cheese on her breath,
but when all hell broke loose he died, cognac
in the cupboard, shirts in the closet, postcards hanging
on the bulletin board, and soap in the sink. Patriots
hung a plaque on the sidewalk outside his home: He died
for France.

We stand on the metro listening through ear buds
and nobody looks particularly happy to be living (or dying)
in France. Twenty years from now, old
and looking back at ourselves young and standing
while graffiti races past in the tunnel, what
will we see? I can’t believe my hair. Nice pants.
Our minds on the station we are going to. Our minds on the station
we got on. Our hearts set on the women
on either side of us. We hope to drink
all the wine in the city, make love to the women
and when we die get a plaque that misstates our intentions.

(A god with broken feet, trying to recall
forgotten language, old faces, lost
stone, he died for chocolate and baguettes, this sky,
that river, for villages and fields he never saw,
mountains and shores he only at his best imagined…)

Put everybody they say died for France in one room
and you have a crowded room with people who don’t
say much. Some were talented at things we care
about, and most less so. All of them lived
in some gone place—the city a river—
the plaque like ocher hand prints left by Indian
boys on a cliff wall. I back row, fight
the current, pause, and float on.

——————————————————————————

This year I won’t read the news, won’t sog
myself in helplessness or lose heart in the lies
nice people tell, try not to feel blue about where
we’re all headed and be sure to lie down when I can

and look at the sky. The old timers say
what a great city this was before new people came
and filled in the lake. There were reeds and everybody
had his own boat. The dumb were uninformed

and knew it, not so proud of everything
they just learned on the Internet. That was when Mexico
was the real Mexico, back in the big lake, big
pyramid days. Think of your old friend

and the father he lost when he was twelve.
No way to Google what it meant, he ripped around the world
for years, then shot himself on the basement couch. We all
know people who nurse too long their wounds

because the facts aren’t available.
I passed a young man chipping paint around a window. Later
I passed him again when he’d begun to prime.
He didn’t notice me as I didn’t notice the people

who passed me when I scraped and painted
decades ago. Where were they going and did they
get there? Nobody knows and you can’t look it up and most
are dead and those who aren’t don’t remember, which doesn’t mean

it doesn’t matter. Anymore, I only go to New Jersey
for funerals. It’s just worked out that way. Other places I go
for other reasons I don’t know, and I resolve this year,
when I’m lying on the grass, not to think about it anyway.

I could go where they have those paintings
I’ve seen in books, or to that park built for the princess
for love, or come back at another time
and see the jacaranda trees in bloom—

is that here?—or the cherries
that festival when people get drunk
put on strange clothes and dance wild
in parades, or have a drink where Baudelaire did—
or was it a painter who stumbled
out this very door and pissed in the alley?

His paintings are worth millions now but then
he slept in the street. Youth, where did
ours go? Was it here they piled the heads
after they cut them off? Or was it down that street
that ends in sky—that rue, where all the places are
we used to know or heard about and longed to go?

I read somewhere we are rich for things
we don’t have to do, the places
we don’t have to go. I drank tea at James Joyce’s
Starbucks and walked in a blizzard
along the Seine, threw snowballs at ducks
while a gypsy tried to give me a brass
ring he pretended to find
for gold — Your lucky day, he said.

Yes, mine. On this river heroes,
saints and fools, the promise of circus
and the dark encroachment of catastrophe
float by behind blowing snow
like a grove of giant cedars on Lolo Creek
another place I’ve never been
but sometimes think I’d like to go.

——————————————————————————

You Asked

It’s a crack in the wall
I blink through
at a weedy lot I vaguely remember

a door to where the dead
live, to rooms
I’ve only dreamed

a naked dancer in my yard at night
who draws me
to cup my hands to the window—

and when I turn back
blood racing, it’s my own
well-lighted room (chair, table, lamp)

neither dreamed
nor remembered
never even known until now

or later, lying in bed
feeling the wind against the side of the house
coming all the way from China.

————————————————————————————————–

Daughter

What seeds do you carry
and where? I see them cluster
in your hair.

They spill down your back
and scatter across
the shadowed path.

The wind blows hard, the leaves
begin to fall, and in the dark
I smell snow.

What is this language you make
me want to speak?

Your voice carves beauty
in winter air. I walk
behind and listen.