hjärta

mint tea with honey. the radio station i used to listen to, once. the sounds of the neighborhood louder than the sounds of the city. the dark.

my hands did not belong to me today. they straightened the paperwork, collected it in piles, sorted, shuffled. they washed an enormous head of lettuce and dried it, they watered the fern and the gardenia. they drew thick black lines on my eyelids, to hide me from my own gaze, to discourage the sun. they open the door to the metro car, they pick up the matindirect and flip through the pages, obama speaks out for tolerance, other headlines. they pull on boots, chop beets, float in front of me like white fish with red-tipped fins, trailing them like ribbons.

there are hundreds of small locks on the pont des arts. they lock up nothing, or maybe lock together the names of two lovers, a promise, a wish. an italian couple asks me to take their picture. they stand with their backs to the ile de la cité and smile, and they are beautiful, and i snap the shutter closed twice, because i am afraid one of them might blink. i tell them, you are beautiful, because i do not know how not to say it.

i can smell the crèpes at chez isobel, i will name my firstborn after those crèpes. the petit fripe is open and playing noir désir. they are drinking sparkling wine, and it sparkles hard in the sun. the man at the kitchen shop tries to convince me to buy the copper pots i am picking up and putting down and turning in the light. i tell him that one day i will have a life that fits these pots, and i will return, and i will buy all the pots i can carry home, and cook enough food that i need to use every one of them. he laughs, and my hands set the pots down, and they push the door open, and they lead me out into the sun.

why not yet? why a big yawning not yet that opens up time before me as a vacuum that i am just on the edge of being sucked into, but which will not resolve to take me, not yet. hanna is teaching me swedish words: heart, wine, knife, pepper. cheese. brain. salt. poem. a fly has landed in my tea.