White Slip on the Paris Metro

  From the fouled nests of Villejuif
to the street below,
then the walk, the steps down
to the catacomb metro—

             I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tajines
and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles,
waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry
and how many skies exiled?

How many skies?
To ride this silent film
under cobbled Paris, her exposed-bone sycamores,
to pitch and tilt and judder,
             in scumbled light,
there among the speeding cataleptic,
rocking like the drowned,
being how many kinds of foreign
and living like Saint Jerome.

And I speak stone but no one speaks.
I have slept against my reflection.
I have pretended a bored sleep.

But once I raised my head
and saw, I swear, a woman wearing falling snow.

She glowed supernova in a slip.
Not a knot or a kiln or a boat ramp
but a dress from the silver water of the moon
and a liquid shape, each way free.

Not wine-lips red or black
but blue-shadowed pearl white silk,
a dress of movie light,
a dress that’s all of May,
the force of curve, all liquid words,
a whirly night sea’s murmur—
And I speak stone but no one speaks.
I have slept against my reflection.
I have pretended a bored sleep.

Then at once the doors leapt open
and in that hiss like a wave pulling back on the sand
she was gone.

Yet in a city of crows, my ribs marimba’d,
at that temple door, I was accordion lunged.
I saw a candle-lit woman in the florescent metro,
a woman like a sudden pillar of doves.

“White Slip on the Paris Metro” first appeared in The Southern Review, Fall 2006.