Shreds of newspaper and pages from magazines
zigzagged toward the earth, feathering from the
high apartments down to the obsidian street.
Someone signed the treaty.
A brass band played behind a closed door.
Women, women, women.
More women than I'd ever seen in one space
shuffled or danced passed, twirling beads,
blowing kisses.
I was still ***** from the trenches.
An old man patted my back. A wordless, knowing nod.
Knowledge he understood and seemed to express, with time,
I would too. But in that moment,
in cheery Paris, all I felt: parceled and sold.
My body had become a vessel. This is something
you hear people say, "The body is a vessel,"
but I learned it, knew it; it was real to me.
I saw landmines and bullets have their way.
Boys, eighteen or nineteen, covered in ****
and puke and bile. I knew what bile was,
really knew.
A waiter outside a restaurant rushed over to me,
handed me a glass of wine. He looked at me like
he wanted me to say something.
It's just a vessel. This wasn't defeatism. This was.
The first time I got shot that's when I really
knew. I took one in the shoulder, went out the back,
shattered my collar bone. Pieces of me were missing.
A little girl, mousy and brunette, much like my own
niece, wrapped her arms around my leg as I walked down
the street. Eased her off. Set her feet back on the ground.
She curled her thumb and forefinger together with both hands, a pantomime of a pair of glasses. I did the same.
She lived entirely in her body.
She's endlessly fascinated by how her fingers bent and straightened,
by how far and fast her legs could carry her, the uncompromising
world, a child's ownership of time.
I wasn't floating above my body. It wasn't a bird in a dream.
When I returned home I was always off to the side, suffering
each sensation and conversation obliquely. This wasn't negative.
In a way this was a freedom: I was not a body; I was shapeless,
shifting, liquid in the hands of perceived reality and aging moments.
The girl took my hand, led me down a series of alleys until we reached
the Seine. She pointed. Men lit fireworks on the dock. They ran a safe distance.
Lines of incarnadine light shot upwards. One stream, however, fired crooked, almost a forty-five degree angle. When the fireworks sounded, all but the stray erupted invisible to the viewers, tucked away within the grey clouds. The rogue, much to the crowd's delight, exploded and scattered just above the water. A collective Ahhh. A soft fizzle.