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—

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

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

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

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,

Their street is being frosted to a myth.

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

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