Scenes Abroad

I

Paris. At twenty in this city, I was afraid
of everything. Out of the jet’s huge belly, we detached
from our own hour into this other. Set down
into foreignness I’d trembled, as “other” as a bride.

Now, in a marriage to myself that will last 60 years,
I have outlived the first chapter. My hands,
no longer so precious nor so impotent. My faults,
familiar and forgivable. My neck, laced with no
metaphors. My ears hear pretty well. Not better.

And now we can start seeing other people—
me and I. The rapture of a dome. The voice
of the contralto in the square transport me but say
nothing about me. And these ancient and end
lessly rewritten buildings: are in some ways
like me, but are neither me nor mine.

II

A young man refinishes a 16th-Century door
with a knife and a ruler on the rue Belleyme.
An old man in a work coat lacquers the mortar
of a brasserie that has perked a century on his corner.

Geometries of responsibility, restoration, reinvention.
A young woman in a blue coat carries tulips
under one arm. Red to light up her 18th-Century flat.
The city’s rituals seem bound to this rhythm:

to reinvent what you mustn’t wish back.
The young lovers languish on benches in the square
smacked flat with a love that can’t outlast time.
But the benches themselves speak resilience here:
We have seen dukes and stars and turpentine.