Posters of Juliette Greco, the Eiffel
Tower. A good French bistro in the Village,
Its cuisine by some oversight not yet
Widely known; all the more murmured over

The first time I saw it, I thought what an ugly specimen. It looked like Grandma’s bathing cap, grown green and small after all these years. I sliced it open and tasted the pale flesh. And gradually she offered herself up leaf by leaf. In her depths she held a tiny, faded star, a spark that fell in the meteor shower over Frank’s garden. 

The trees were soon hushed in the resonance
of darkest emerald as we rushed by
on 322, that route which took us from

We trapped him—
the dignified male
with the graceful neck—

The duck dead and gutted,
we walk the vaulted cavity
to the heart; large,

—Yes, my friend, making my grave rounds. Our mother’s there,
my brother too, and the wife’s niece, buried last year,
   only seventeen, leukemia, it seems. And you, sir?

You spoiled something back there at the beginning,
a vowel, a syllable, a word,
and the poem’s inedible now,

As the Catalonians do, I eat the eyes at once.
My brawny palms flatten their mainstays.
I pop the shells with my thumbs, then crunch.

Suppose Gauguin bad never seen Tahiti. Suppose the beche-de-mer and sandalwood trade bad not materialized
and the Polynesian gods held fast in the fruit of Nuku Hiva and the milk-and-honey waters of Eiao.

The nymph whom Paris swears he never knew
From lofty Ida sends these scribbled few
Words to him to whom she still is true.