Coup de Foudre

 

If I met you, in Paris perhaps,

what would we say? I don’t speak

French, at least not fluently—

I can say Où est la piscine

and I like how the word champignons

works my tongue and lips, it’s soft

but muscular, leaves me waiting, open-mouthed

but for what? A mushroom? What’s the point?

And if you must know, I don’t much like swimming pools,

not when there’s any kind of ocean to be had—

I myself peed in both as a child

but no one ever noticed when it was in the ocean,

that’s the thing about oceans, they’re huge, everything dissipates,

and so I didn’t feel bad at all about doing what I was doing.

But now look—here on a dull day in Paris—

what’s happened to us?

So far, all we have shared is a fungus

and my views on oceanic urination—

I think we should forget France and meet somewhere else

like the silent language of the library perhaps.

The reference section. You are looking up

my skirt (a rarity but okay I shall wear one that day)

while pretending to look up the etymology of “etymology”.

Still inexplicably loitering around conventional thinking on love

 

I purport to be investigating French phrases,

(specifically ones that begin with Coup—

I have always been drawn to the words “blow” and “stroke”)

d’etat, de foudre, de grace, de main, de theatre, d’oeil)

but really I’m investigating the potential of your upper arms

for a sudden forceful unforeseen occurrence, some explosion

of inelegant gesture that might lead to the defenestration

of both our decorums. As your sudden force 

backs me into the stacks and threatens

the orderly volumes of

REF F-K,

you fall to your knees

and you thrust your face

into the folds of my skirt, (and if in this fantasy I am

to wear a skirt, you must wear again the hat you wore

when first we met) fingering the backs of my soon-to-give-in

naked knees as your hat tumbles to the non-descript floor and before

I even get a chance to notice our matching haircuts

we are being rudely interrupted by an irate person of some apparent importance,

mouthing something about silence and threats from the authorities, but we don’t care,

we’re just too excited by the sudden sharp taste of life,

all citrus-y and slippery and smelling of what sweats

and later still, as I lick my way through your back catalogue

of etymological investigations, boy oh boy you invoke my origins

as you whisper to me as many variations of liqourish as you can think of . . .

and when we’re done, I tell you, breathlessly that I will leave you

if you ever speak to me of Paris or swimming pools

and I immediately regret it, all of it, especially the reference

to the hat you wore when we first met, but it doesn’t matter

because you’ve gone to sleep already. Or maybe you’re just gone

back to whatever you were doing before

I imagined you

would want to meet like this, surrounded

by dictionaries so that like fictionaries we could pretend

we don’t know what is always going to happen,

we could pretend we don’t know that

we will always strike one another

as deeply familiar, we will always know

how to blow one another away

from the calm center of timeless desire

we could pretend we don’t know

how we always keep ending

a bolt suddenly, as if out of nowhere

a locked face, a fist of wordless absent thunder…

where will we meet and pretend in words anew

that our origins won’t speak as they always do?