A Way

She said she sang very close to the mike

to change the space. And I changed the space

by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans

until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket.

As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there.

He came from the desert, I came

from green suburbs. We understood

nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine.

I was playing Girl. He played

Man. Several plots were afoot, all

misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt

and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger

after months on an oil rig. Another

was untranslatable. Apollinaire

burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre

but I had lost my pen. The engineer

read only construction manuals. His room

was dim and narrow and no,

the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways

to throw oneself away.

One singer did it by living by a broken wall

until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song,

she said, like an Appalachian artifact.

Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay

plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls

through which the current chortles an intimate tune.