Oh my god, it’s Paris by moonlight
Even the trees are drunk and walking
A single pink slipper floats down the Seine

For all I know I was meant to be one of those marchers
into a microtonal near-future whose pile has worn away—
the others, whose drab histrionics provoke unease to this day,

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”

The sound of women hidden
among the lemon trees. A sweetness
that can live with the mind, a familiarity

I was getting water tonight
off-guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted

The shadows behind people walking
in the bright piazza are not merely
gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness

I found a lengthy word with a non-Russian ending,
unwittingly, inside a children’s storybook,
and turned away from it with a strange kind of shudder.

My eldest son rolls over in his sleep
and, like an actor mid-soliloquy,
he murmurs, “Nothing—”

Night after night he walks the Paris he knew.
Searches out each place. Hotel Duc de Bourgoin
on Ile Saint Louis, the primitive room

Had she not lain on that bed with a boy
All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.