Oh yeah, sometimes I do write poems...

This is not going to be my departure bye-bye France post, partly because I don't want to write that yet, and partly because, thanks to our friend Eyjafjallajokull over in Iceland, my flight got delayed/partially canceled. I still will probably be home tomorrow, but for the moment I don't know when. I'm really frustrated about this, but I'm posting one of my Paris poems, because I've been writing them all year, and this one kind of sums up the best of Paris. FYI, a berceuse is a lullaby. It's not totally polished yet, just something I felt like writing.

Berceuse

I’m lying on the grass, eyes up to smoke winding like shadow on blue sky
from the Gauloise between my teeth, and when your laughter crashes into me
I catch it in my own throat, lightness remembering something I forgot I forgot.

Below us, the children of drunk Parisians brandish sticks,
collide through streams as planned as stalagmites
in the cave where waterfall echoes interrupt baisers.

Weeks from now, I’ll be on a plane,
you’ll be somewhere on the map
we’ve carried in our minds all year
of ways to get out of Paris,
and those of us with more adult lives
will go back to living them.

But for now, our steps zig-zagging into each other,
we catch the old Nerf against our bare toes
and as the children sneak in with us, the echoes are ours.

Paris is the three cans we abandoned at the foot of Sacre-Coeur,
it is a dotted path between alimentations generales
and lives displayed in rectangles of light,
the clinking of broken glass against the steps
and Hey Ya, the acoustic version, as we walk home
the roofs spreading out like playing cards
you hold in your hand.