During my year in France,
there was an older man who came into the small café
where I swept floor and dusted windowsills
every morning before dawn
for a breakfast of cheese and bread,
all with a glass of red wine.

As the year endured its temporal fluctuations,
day coming later in winter,
but creeping into early absurdity in summer,
this man with a wind blown sheath of grey hair
and a face that was hardened and pocked like coral,
arrived with precisely enough time
to finish his meal and walk out into a world
just beginning to blink awake

I knew no more of this man
than this small meal of his,
which he consumed slowly and alone
by our long front window
quietly watching the morning stir.

The men I worked with, middle aged and raunchy,
continually flirting with the girls coming home from school
would nod respectfully at this gentleman,
serving him his food and wine without a word
“Who is he?” I once asked, in broken French
They shrugged, “He’s been coming here
since before my time,” was the response

I always wanted to approach him,
tap him on his hunched shoulder
and ask him his story, ask him why so early
but interrupting this ritual of his seemed,
to me, akin to stopping a man at prayer

I have spoken with him many times
in idle hours in the years since that café
He tells me, his words dripping with the precision
of a man who understands the importance
of saying exactly what he means to say,
I prefer this to be my welcome to life,
this little village of the world
poised in its movements, pandiculating
and at peace with its parts

~~

It is late on a summer afternoon
my study has ripened the red of an apple’s skin,
smells lightly of the lilacs wilting outside my window

You are in the other room, singing an aria in Italian
and though I cannot understand the words,
I think it is a piece about an old man
looking back on a woman he loved
who did not love him back,
he spent his whole life waiting for her,
but she has died without ever finding him

Yet this man’s love is not diminished.
He is comparing her to a xanthous field of wheat
beneath a resplendent afternoon sun
rolling like a river in the summer’s wind
How alive it makes him feel,
the delicate way the wheat chaffs flirt with the wind,
the memory of her dancing across from him,
smiling in repose, his heart heavy with the smell
of viscous youth, of hopeful years ahead
when she might hold this same memory
in the slowed breath before sleep

The brimming lilt of your voice
reminds me of wine's dry burn
lingering on tongue's palate
in the seconds before daylight
illuminates a world of unfulfilled love