To A—

Thinking.

Wondering if

my trot to Paris

to suffer you

wasn’t all wrong.

My amour fou

precise as a shark

collecting scents

miles off,

exact as a saint

cowed before

invisible wings

rustling

abstract sheets?

Your eyes

green, and red

your hair,

iconic in this

television universe

of one man

let nothing on,

no “real” Twitter feed

surrendering candid

portraits of what

you believe,

what you love.

And I sit, subtracted,

before my love.

Wondering.

Subjected

as I was

to plural echoes

nth parts sensual,

nth parts trust,

and to hear there

a call

to illegitimate Paris

where I fit

right in,

Jacques Brel songbook,

ukulele, bread

and wine, simulacral

maudit bohemian

pelted by Polanski-ish

rain, but happy

away from Los Angeles

where you fit in,

being able, in one city,

to drive for hours

and never leave home.

My choked voice grumbled

“de chrysanthèmes ...”

(Brel song) as

I sought the streets

of Apollinaire’s “Zone”

on Google maps

(which I paid dearly

for)

still hearing the

angel

even as

you were angry with me

who nearly destroyed

your apartment’s electricity

plugging in some idiotic

gadget of mine

and leaving it smoking

drunk on uke, bread and wine.

Hard not to think

this symbolic

or a great way to pep

up an episode

of Friends, or an ancient

Merchant Ivory film.

If I were Anne Carson

you’d be translation

and I

an impotent scholar

before the Greek,

drawn by love

to the undecided

omnivorous Word

that paints travelogue,

that shields Earth,

begging

this word side with me

when I touch down in Paris,

that it’s you who’d

ground this polysemous

text

with a kiss, or touch

puppyish, unambiguous.

Oh, that Anne

Carson, such a genius.

She makes

me think.

I’ve never been

so wrong, and in

the wrong place,

a foreigner, foreigned

in my own goddamned

country

by double negation

fitting right

in (as I’ve

said) and you

a Mediterranean accent

amidst the stones

of French abstraction,

pride, often cruelty,

noirs désirs

circling like bats

who’ve read too much Saint-Just

and mistaken it for Sade.

(That sounds quite important.

I’m afraid it’s not.)

It rained. I wrote

a pining song

in a hotel room

refusing your offer

to stay with you

and your boyfriend

(quelle horreur)

who spoke no French

while I

conducted vertiginous conversations

with a curator

at the Musée Gustave Moreau

pinning my hopes

on words like “Gautier” (Théophile)

“Mallarmé” and “Rimbaud”

(who didn’t come up

of course),

and marred the language

even further with the help

of Google translate

in my letters to you

in the guise of, who?

it wasn’t Baudelaire

(I can’t remember who,

maybe Marat,

and you, Charlotte Corday).

I liked the pining song,

in the end,

it’s Morrissey-esque, funny

but grim, slippery

and only incomplete

without (or with) you.

Here I do not

go again,

merely think

flat-footed

on my horizon

(scratching

my itchy head, I

think I have dandruff)

while you

sleep

in a Westwood Airbnb

lyrically, so

I am drawn

shark-angelly

down Hollywood Blvd.

on the 302

to an American-style

aperitivo

with sliders instead

of funicular olives

again with you

talking,

and I gazing deep

into your colors,

reading your Tweets

but never commenting.

Such lovely olives.

It’s a beautiful evening.