This is not a race or Meditations on breakfast

One day, making toast,
you notice how happy it makes you
to please someone else.
And how easy.

A simple matter of giving away the good pieces
and keeping the burnt ones to yourself.

Because this is not a race
and you can start over.

On watching a woman getting her hair blown out at a Parisian salon

Sometimes, I just want to come to everyone's rescue -
the nauseous child on the merry-go-round,
a terrier stumbling in the rain,
a tourist lost in a matrix of maps,
an old man puffing on the uphills.

Or this - the woman at Chez Cheveux
getting her hair blown out
and the perfectly lovely set of curls disappearing
under the armed and dangerous hands of the coiffeuse.

I wanted to come to her rescue, too,
imagined I saw small beads of sweat beginning
at her neck, then her whole head drowning
in atomized heat.

I wanted to spin her chair around,
point her toward the window and outside,
where it was obvious the sky was on the verge
of something destructive and wet
and where, leaving the chemical comforts of this place,
she, too, would be forced
to return to herself.

off the A10

It's not what you think - I'm still the same
old person who wants to take the wheel most times.
But now, with the two of us, there is a road
and there is the map, and one person for each.

And so, to the right of you, as you drive,
I sit with each quatrain, figuring the math,
folding our route into bite-sized portions,
sounding out funny-sounding town names
into the air-conditioning, convincing
gas stations from the page, supermarkets, old ladies swinging
laundry bags, children with their dogs, pear trees,
fastitidious rows of artichokes and cabbage,
church cloisters, kneeling cows, ice cream parlors,
junkyard cars, antiques, and rolling vineyards,
not realizing I've taken us far so off the A10,
or how, with such careful hands on the wheel,
you're delivering the map to me.

one bridge, and moonlight

it isn't Paris exactly
but the cliché of Paris
i could fall for.

out of that earthly, eclectic chaos -
this city of cigarette butts and cobblestones,
fashionistas and the chiseled gargoyles of Notre Dame
and a million patisseries churning out a million
armfuls of bread -
it came down to this:

one bridge, and moonlight,
a scale of notes from a single accordion -
and thus, the architecture of a kiss.

i don't think
i will ever remember the name of that bridge
or the accordion's song
or what we were wearing
even though i'd love to tell that story.

i know only that a beam of light caught your lips,
and in the nick of time
i caught you.

happy monkey

Off to the Old World for a few weeks' vacation and epiphany-gathering.
Will attempt to write blog posts from the funny French keyboard.
Promise.

A bientot,

Maya