W rencontrez

In the neighborhood of St. Lazare, humming a line leaked from Dowland, I met you on the street. A Cuban hairdresser warned me in no uncertain terms of your approach but, fool that I am, I grew distracted by brooms and erotic trimmings and paid her no mind.


But how strange it was! You'd cut open your knee on a cobble thrown through 1968 and into this day, to that precise instant, when you could fall, wilting into my arms. You licked blood from your hands with a patient tongue and I pulled out an embroidered hankie.


Sixpence and silver. There were prickles lighting the sky and I had been expecting you sixways, I now realize, though the last place for an unexpected meeting is Paris.


As like as Siamese peascods we were and half as green. I invited you into a steaming tea shop run by a wartime bride with carrot top hair and bad teeth. She spoke execrable French, which flattered me exceedingly, and cooed over us with hard biscuits and sticking plaster.


We slouched in our chairs and sipped the teeth-rotting brew. I told you fairy tales about marionette shows, enchanted photoplates and Stendhal's Syndrome. We marveled at the lines in our palms, glancing furtively at their well-tooled embroidery, and feared to press them together. As if we might find witches hats there, tesseracts or some uncanny meanderings of a future tense.