The house
A frightened face
In the window of another house.

Reconstitute a sense to make of absence
in the still heat of noon, south, summer
where spindled years unravel and unwind,

There were lies. Did you know, and then forget
if there was a lie in the peach orchard? There was the lie
a saxophone riffed on a storm-thick summer sky,

Two thousand orphans, real ones and children of
Jewish deported parents, so you and your
   ill-sorted Red Cross wartime colleagues

Here, the water plunges below the cliff-face.
Here, the locomotive purrs in the station.

This is for Alicia, shaking back dark hair,
dancing one-breasted with the Sabbath bride.

Syllables shaped around the darkening day’s
contours. Next to armchairs, on desks, lamps
were switched on. Tires hissed softly on the damp

The King of Denmark wore a yellow star.
French Jews paid for their own with one textile

Each day’s obits read as if there’s a war on.

Their street is being frosted to a myth.

We’ve loved other bodies the years have altered:
knuckles swollen, skin slackened, eyelids grainy

“Champs Elysées of Broadway” says the awning
of the café where, every Sunday morning,
young lawyers in old jeans ripped at the knees

She was not the builder of model airplanes.
She was not the runner I never could be.
She was not the pillager of my bookshelves,

The streetlights bent
the sleet streams as I went
up the deserted Rue des Deux Ponts,

You mocked me that hot day at Carcassonne,
“We’re tourists now!” waving the green Michelin.
We’d come to meet your old pals from Tucson—

She’s in a room full of letters, dressed in white
amidst proliferate papers, the exploded lace of sheets.
Her hair froths white, her pale eyes chill, as when I first