poetry

• He's in Paris
• Pablo in Paris
• In the Morning
• Tragedy
• Frost in Washington
• Edinburgh Reading Room
• How the Dead Keep Their Voices

Pablo in Paris

It is a pleasant enough portrait
two people, lovers perhaps,
Pablo and Olga in Paris,
smiling in their disjointed way,
painted on different days of mind,
when she is here, he is there,
or both here and there,
but only in parts together.

Paris has always been that way.
That is how lovers meet,
come together, an arm or hand
at a time, on the quai, sitting,
one dreaming of the river, the other
drifting with the clouds
both smiling for the moment
content to be there
in a disjointed liaison,
a goat fashioned of clay and old iron,
whatever else the twentieth century
might provide and discard,
the perspective turned ever so
slightly to expose dimensions
of different weeks or months.