JPG

White Slip on the Paris Metro

From the fouled nests of Villejuif
to the street below,
then the walk, the steps down
to the catacomb metro--

I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tajines and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles,
waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry
and how many skies exiled?

How many skies.
to ride this silent film under cobbled Paris, her exposed-bone sycamores,
to pitch and tilt and judder, in scumbled light, there among the speeding cataleptic,
rocking like the drowned,
being how many kinds of foreign and living like Saint Jerome.

And I speak stone but no one ...

Eliot Khalil Wilson