Lesser Evils

After a morning of work in separate rooms

she said she was going to the municipal pool

and he said he would walk along the river

for a while before they met back for their lunch

of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went

to the lobby of the Hotel du Panthéon

to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup

ofnthe Irish tea she liked and he to

the little church of St. Médard. A couple

old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews.

He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone.

And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes

were filled with kids from the elementary school

or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said

a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex

with the curtains drawn against the chemistry

students conducting their experiments in the building

across the street. Incremental triumphs

of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings

they liked to fire champagne corks over at the vast

darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice

startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe.

Turning back to their tumors with relief.