You dismiss the tiny, protesting fraction
back home, claim you've learned a nation

and its customs, people, mores. Did you and your

While watching 
a movie
with a lovely, unyielding, 

Suddenly fatigued among French
women in the roman

“Look, my legs,” you point after lying on the rocks. 
By your toes, water is light yellow 
like the most beautiful mouth wash. 

In the other world 
You’re holding a bubble in your hands 
It reflects everything as it grows 

Where maid and eunuch whisper ‘love and death’,
While Hawk and Eagle grouse and peck and lurch,
Two parakeets upon a single perch.

The children have packed up the light
And gone home for the bedtime story
In which Jack wakes the Sleeping Fury.

Liberal, blue-eyed, shivering, trying not
to look like a bill
collector or detective,

I used to pretend I stumbled into the place
casually, after a long day shopping or
I'd pretend I was a drunk

I lived in the poor part of town
where the hookers hung out on the street corners at night,
and sometimes,