What happened was this: the concierge’s bra was padded. There was bottle service. I drank Absolut, since it was Europe and that seemed the urbane but inoffensive choice. I thinned it with fruit juice so it turned ruby and I could nurse it better. There, Jack Daniels was what the bon chic, bon genre wanted, what marked them as of the world. That’s what was in her tall, thin glass: what she imagined Americans quaffed.

She and I danced on a white platform. She had shed the two gold skeleton keys pinned to her lapels hours before, when she recommended this place as not one many tourists knew. He and I had thrilled to that bit.

The music slowed. Her lips were pink. The floor was dark, slashed by strobes. Her foam-covered breasts brushed mine in that brusque yet intimate way a shopper’s will when she reaches over your cart to grab a box of name-brand cereal. I was similarly startled. Then her eyes shifted and I felt her lips’ cling cool as the outside of a cheap jewelry box, the quick damp dart of her tongue before it was gone.

Along the banquette, a French guy high-fived the guy who one year later would become my fiancé. I didn’t see. I only know because he told me so. Made a point.

Outside, the sky had gone lilac, the Haussmann buildings tinted pink. Hip folks milled, negotiating, locking down alliances. We went for soupe à l’oignon gratinée. The dining room mirrored and bleary, après-danse. A bottle of something French and mid-tier, enough to impress. The soup arrived, cheese stretched thin enough over each crock to see through. It had sat under a lamp.

“I’m surprised,” the concierge said, her plucked blonde brows raising slightly at the idea. “Most Americans are so… what is the word?… prudish.”

What happened was this: nothing happened. We ate, then went home for two hours, packed the suitcases. The sun knifed through the blinds in bright slats. He wanted to take photos. I did not. In the end, me with a lollipop on the poufed hotel duvet, tears dissolving into vignette, white thighs and cherry-blossom nipples in focus. I still exist there, somewhere on a camera’s card.

In order to get out, you must drive through the part of town that’s not so picturesque. There was champagne on the plane in plastic cups. I drank it pre-takeoff, closed my eyes but didn’t sleep, like a shop where the clerk hides quietly behind a Roman shade till the would-be patron leaves. That shop stayed shut for years. The things it held became antique. They gathered dust. Accrued.

the cat surveys the windy yard
the swollen creek transcends its banks
the winter ground unfolds its pinks
to dicey sky and eager bird

my coffee squirms in whorls of steam
I cup its warmth in trembling hands
it braces me for what portends
its message muddied by the cream

the sky divulges not a word
who knows the sun and what it thinks?
I nod to it and give it thanks
the cat surveys the windy yard

Ruminants are mammals that are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion, principally through microbial actions. The process typically requires the fermented ingesta (known as cud) to be regurgitated and chewed again. The process of rechewing the cud to further break down plant matter and stimulate digestion is called rumination. The word “ruminant” comes from the Latin ruminare, which means “to chew over again.” (Wikipedia)

The living green goes into a gut
especially for stewing
then is retrieved
for a second chewing.

A knot of cud augmented
by funk from within
foments, fermented,
now in the swell of the paunch,

now in the honeycombed tripe.
Pulled up for another gnaw,
then down to the omasum –
known too as bible, psalterium.

And at last the maw,
where rennet is added
to the remnant, dull and warm,
of whatever bright thing first invited

rumination in this pensive
thing masticating, that stares
at something beyond the fence of
the neighbor’s farm

Twice a week I jog past a green house where an old artist lives, and if my loop back
coincides with dusk, I’ll see the lamp with the red shade radiant in one corner
of the front room where, through the naked window, I know she’s looking down
at the pages in her lap, as I will by the light of my likewise florid lamp
someday when I’m old enough to prune the trees in the yard till it looks as wild
and neat as this bright cottage of which I always dreamed. The gleam raises
my eyes from that favorite tome before I plod on past, up the long hill that looks
so falsely flat, and reach the relief of downslope to my home street. Pausing first
to tuck four saucer-large blooms into my hand, I speed through the gathering gloom,
a beam of headlights washing sudden across my face, and the sudden curt thought, too,
of who is this woman hugging the muddy shoulder of a back road with a clutch
of posies in her grip, and the flare of something like rage: at the presumption
of these petals, the earliness of the season this year – such cheek – the looks folks shot
at me all fall, on account of that sticker on my bumper, at red lights, which this one is –
exhaust turning ruddy as it gathers in a cloud behind me, then a green light and I’ll turn:
right, right turn, always right, the lights in the waiting house aglow beyond the now
dark yard, the chair ready for the one I’ll be when I get there, the tale I’ll read.

Filling the front window of the small house: a lit-up, sumptuous dollhouse.
The saucer magnolia’s blooms break open early. They are already browned.

It is February. In the grocery, a child screams three aisles over for what it can’t have.
The automated lotto machine does not give change. It says so after you’ve fed it a $5 bill.

The silver maples on our street list: crooked, waterlogged, and dead. Only my landlord
springs to have ours hacked down so some stray storm won’t plunge it through the roof.

A fat robin hops onto the stump as I pull in from work, in fruitless pursuit of a worm.

A crew of seven showed up in a truck
hauling a skid steer loader and a steel maw
on a trailer that ate logs open-jawed,
leaving piles of fragrant dust in the street.
First went the canopy that shed a shower
of brown leaves each November.
Next the stubbed-off crown, and the crook
where the trunk forked, where one night
last spring the moon got caught in the lace
of newly minted whirlybirds. Then the saw
signed its hieroglyphic lines across the bole,
cut out a deep wedge from a foot above the base.
Its girth half gone, the listing column crashed
with a thud that shook the house. And now, below,
a network notes the loss, then quietly regrows.

            February: knot
of riled gnats confer in the
yard as the sun sinks

Change is good, they say
as if change isn’t a neutral thing
as if it’s not an empty purse
unclasped and waiting

to receive – or not –
the jingling handful
of extra, remainder
of a transaction completed

hope and change
and peace through strength
and strength through unity
and unity through faith
as if change is plainly good

and no change plainly good,
as well, depending on
the seller and the goods
as if we’re now excused

from asking what was
and what’s to be:
and who precisely
will make this change
trickle it into our hands

the change we chase
glimmers golden, jangles
like walking-around money
as when the boy I saw yesterday

paused and stooped to retrieve
a heads-up penny
on the path to school

Third-quarter moon caught in the pines across the street,
its orange oblong knocked slightly to the right,
this afternoon’s demure crop of crocuses shut up for the night.

Beyond the frogs’ wee-hours din down in the creek,
one street over – bright, then gone, then bright –
comes the yellow flare of a house’s front hallway light.

A man’s voice rings out, bellowing complaint:
what he’s going to do – here his words are muffled – and what he ain’t
and a woman replies if he’ll just turn the other cheek

her friend will black his good eye, too, for in truth she’s no saint
either. I stand, held by the brawl that brought me out, under the quaint
scalloping of my front porch roof, my heart thudding, my silence replete.

It’s never enough that I wash the dishes after you’ve made a huge dinner the night before.
Not to me. Next day I soap the plates and pans and fear you’ve silently noted the pot

of my middle-aged belly and, with effort, convince yourself each morning not to leave.
I work harder for a spell before I fall short again. I log each deficit in the ledger of

my mind, make a notch in the wall of this place where I hole up. Some days the door
cracks open, a shaft of light falls upon the hash-marked stone. Your face in the opening,

beaming with delight. I walk outside, blinking at the dazzle. Some days it’s too bright.
I try to stay as long as I can in the sun. Your warmth seeps into my bones. In the kitchen,

what you make for me tastes so good. I say thank you and try to eat until I’m full again.
I lean back in my chair. I think of that cold lair. I say another thank you. It’s not enough.