Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Twelve Weeks

• 108 twelve weeks The last day with you. We dance again. Your head when I pull you up lays itself upon my shoulder. Like getting on for the ride, where’s your ticket, Señor? How you fold into me, how deep your sorrow, how with relief you accept my condolences, let me dance you. Oh what grieves you, Monsieur? Oh why do you sob? Stanza means room. Italian. I dance you across the ancient room, your head propped on the ceiling of Earth’s largest room to the window again. Today is warm. Your first warm day. Your crying stops. I pray always to bring you to this window to watch the people cross down there as they have at this crossroads for centuries. Rue de Varenne and Rue du Bac. Planned the most famous assassinations in the basement. Always I feel you watching as learning how to be here. That you are a stranger. That you’ve come whole, but wholly a stranger. That you must learn like a prison system the way, the only permissible way. The way you hang your head onto my heart as if remembering before the pain of entering here. The clouds of glory. As if your flesh, hair, limbs, body and soul of a boy must grow from all that’s ever been and all that is. War. The assassinated. As if in that seat when I put you back your loud sigh is the resigning to the long, longest road ahead. Now on the metro I fall into every face, torn body, mad mind out of a woman. Out of a woman, everyone. The sockless sixty-year-old folded into the stair slab at this stop. That they all were you, baby • 109 so new so tender so perfect out of two bodies out of union. And now out of that world, on the other side I come upon you again at your mother’s breast. Giggling pulling her nipple, the two of you laughing in the timeless universal conspiracy nations must overthrow. —Paris, France—Lopez Island, Washington, April 10–11, 1991 ...