Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Tomorrow I Will Be in Paris

Tomorrow I will sit outside a café in Paris
and drink coffee and read the paper
and watch stick figures in their haute couture.

That is what I am expected to do.
I will wander through the mostly empty rooms
of a museum and stare at brazen brushstrokes

dead for a hundred years or more
while pretending that I have great insight into color and form.
That is what I am expected to do.

I will sleep with a mysterious stranger named Collette,
the sun pouring through the open window
to wash our bodies clean of the encounter

before we rise and take to the street
to move the clock forward an hour or two,
for that is what we are expected to do.

After a glass of wine and a baguette,
I shall take a long nap in the sagging bed
in the top room of the house of yellow stucco

while bicycles in the street below ring their bells.
That is what I am expected to do.
In the evening I will rise from my body

and float down streets into the bouquet of lights
that is Paris when romance and leisure summon the night,
for that is what I am expected to do.

When I awaken in the morning from this cockeyed dream,
I will call you Collette and buy two tickets to France,
for I am certain that this is what you expect me to do.

~William Hammett


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