Days of 1971, 1972

Between my nights washing dishes at the restaurant

—one star in the Michelin—where rich folks from Toulouse

ate their quiet country dinners, and my afternoons

on the ledge below the eves outside my little room

above the private riding club, the ledge that looked south

across green hills to the Pyrenees and where I sat

for eight months and read the expected Europeans

—Celine, of course, Baudelaire, Cavafy in little prose

fragments in his French translation—and for the first time

understood what it was about the Americans—Poe,

Melville, Whitman, Henry Miller—how they could be sad

and exuberant on the same page and how right

that sounded to me . . . in the mornings between my job

and the reading, she would come back, often just at dawn

when the nightingales still called from the far horse pasture,

before the black mountains had whitened under their warm

Iberian sun . . . she would come back tired and smelling

of her other, more experienced lovers and would wake

me, sometimes gently caressing my beard or bringing

me back to this hard world by quietly ripping pages

from my books and dropping them on me like a blanket.

Appeared in Hanging Loose # 83