“Visiting Paris in a Blizzard”
Descending cloud-bundled skies at dawn,
our plane navigates a vein of snow
snaking cold where it wants to go.
We beat dawn to the sleeping city.
Slowly, the indigo Fibonacci trees wizen—
this is not just any Sunday, bon,
but a day Parisians visit Paris too, a laughing flow
of sledding children flooding Montmartre, Parc de Sceaux.
We shared a bouquet of macarons and rose petal tea.
Your body was a quiet and soft storm that sighs on
inside me, melting snowdrifts into roaring rivers whereupon
I float with my eyes closed in smile, the slow, thorough
spread of thaw painful at first—shock, tingle, hello.
Eight years ago, a piano student’s father asked me
to bring his boy home. My car was a flimsy mizen
trailing masts of staccato darkness and horizontal rain, denouement
of some glorious cacophony I can’t remember now although
I remember so exactly how the road disappeared in rain, aglow
with my headlights, and how he said: “It looks like we’re going up and on,
into space.” White-knuckled and working to keep on course but show
all was well, I smiled: “Yes, and the other cars’ lights glow
like shooting stars.” Quiet in the backseat as I worried he might know
how very afraid I was of wrecking him in some planetary ditch with me.
“You paint a lot of flowers,” he broke his quiet with a yawn.
“You should paint the night sky, these stars of cars, the raining on.”
