Paris Rain

for the roofers

You can hear them sing on the scaffolddragging their metal ladders across,you can hear the rough steel banglike fine brassjust below your windowswhere they wait for the rain to endand the heavy bell of the little churchhangs from its cast iron crown.

Nobody wants to be really aloneeating a lunch of stone breadand salami, unless it's the foremanparked down the blockhiding beneath his woolen hatcocked low over the midday calm

and nobody wants to wake in the darkamong leafy gargoyles and mansard roofs,misremembering how they arrived,their work forgotten, their tools and boots,their gravity left behind in the airlike a bee who can't find the hive.

You listen to the sound of the Paris rainthe bells of the churchand the ladder's clangyour jet-lag dreams of Xanax and wine,of escape from the narrow fields of time,of no one to ask and no one to blameone and the samein the hands of the rain.