He’d bought his stockings on this road about a year ago.
An older woman in a purple balaclava took coins from his palm with soft, deft fingers
and returned to him, 20 francs, by hands with wrinkled, spotting knuckles.
She bid him farewell with the rasping voice
of a connoisseur of humble suffering, a savant of chronic transience.
He left with a kind word and a soft smile, tapping the bell in unprompted glee.
Her grandson stole his change when he left.
Passing under the shop’s rusted overhang,
he wiggles his toes to acknowledge the wool’s soft texture
and grace his acquaintance’s strange competence with a memory.
This road was scarcely the only harbor he’d entrusted with moments.
The city sheltered decades–his, theirs and those unawares,
in a kaleidoscope of generations, a mirage of structure and order, that exists in tandem with an eternal beauty that, in winter, is draped in the silent individualism of its beginning.
He travels in this city and on this night,
as the sky is bare and blessed; overcast enough to hold secrets,
and the sidewalks, deflated by daily traffic, are soft enough to muffle footsteps.
A lovely solitude sits among them; beckoning companions on behalf of miracles.
He’s a poor substitute for mortal comfort tonight.
The cold in the air has its own echo that resonates and reverberates between fingers and toes,
like the constant whispers and breaths of strangers.
Frost blankets his hunched, sloping shoulders, as it falls from the sky in soft condolences;
weighing his body down with bouts of unwelcomed pity.
Cities never sleep, they slumber; in thick, unassuming waves of silence and warmth.
Mother Nature weeps with a seasonal sorrow.
Complaints over the claustrophobic nature of the avenues escape him, for he swears they stretch on for kilometers this night.
Hardly a wheel turns the corner, but an odd little dog scampers down the street; chasing belonging back to nowhere. It’s one way, nobody had told him.
All the shops along the sidewalks are darkened, but not so much black, as blue;
the moon breathes color into shadow, as the sun shouts shades into light.
The wasteful delicacies that line patisserie shop windows once the moon retires are absent,
but meter-long sheets of baking parchment still house crumbs of dough and sugar, and sweet little mice scramble to break the glass and catch a taste. They’re awake.
Tomes of paper and answers line shelves behind the doors of bookshops;
the leather of their spines desperately reach for the floor, but the binding grips them tight.
Thin threads and swathes of fabric sit in rolls on the floors of simple boutiques, waiting to be punctured and prodded for dress the next day.
He feels the pain of purgatory much the same way; in the waiting and craning of your neck over the broad shoulders of time, in the crucifixion of impatience and the rusted nails of anticipation, in the cyclic posture of its presence.
Lonely automobiles envelop the pavement with the promise of desertion once the sun settles, the headlights encrusted in ice can hardly stand the rest.
The atmosphere is so beautifully alone.
The corner is met with soft steps and he stills against the cold iron of a lamppost.
He rests below a shattered window;
and shards of glass, so soft and imaginary, litter the frost at his feet.
An imitation of naked sunlight catches the snow and casts cracked glass shadows
on the rough skin of his cheeks, but warms them nonetheless.
It dances with feather-soft tiptoes across his forehead
and leaps down the bump in his crooked nose
before returning back behind the confines of its faulty prison,
pretending it had never broken free.
It dims to only a small wire set ablaze, and then flickers into dying,
banishing the beauty from his face and punishing the frost to a matte existence.
Across the street, the little man at every corner blinks green.
He obeys its wishes and leaves the dying light behind.
The street breaks into a gaping chasm crowded with saplings and fall flowers.
A revolving monument of youth mocks him from the center of the square;
the intimacy between them tarries, and the trees sway against the wind, widening his view.
The carousel’s faux beaux arts facade twists artistry into caricature as it always did before, but the skewered stallions have maudlin eyes this many years later.
The boy he once was collapses into the unwanted rush of nostalgia.
The sky was white like fondant that day, but the carousel–the carousel, was golden.
A monolith of subtle vibrance, a whisper of wonderland shimmering beyond the snow.
The horses bounced without touching the platform in a delicate fantasy; manufactured, but not lost on childhood dreams. Their reins, molded solid, were still seized by small, grubby hands that pleaded for pliability. Drooling tots throned their backs, their hips clamped between the palms of their parents, as they stretched to pet the manes.
Children are much more mesmerized by what things can be rather than what they are.
Watercolor landscapes in grassy greens and sky blues peek out from behind stenciled designs in the gilding, and older men who think themselves artists trace the strokes from a meter away.
The legs of his trousers were soaked with burning snow and his ankles were irritate, but he was only five places behind, and if he stayed, he’d be the first one in his year to ride the carousel.
The magical notes of the musical ride roused him to almost crushing anticipation.
He swears; the Renaissance crested and fell and the Colonies broke away from England before his feet finally adorned the front of the line.
As they fell into the stamped steps of another, a man with a dark round hat perched on a wooden stool shushed his movement.
Have you read the sign, young man?
In response, he turned to face the scene beyond the man’s hand; a wooden plank with lazy marks of color, lay in the muddy frost.
It had no letters.
The marks had flipped and traded places, transposing in the blink of an eye,
but to his horror, they held no meaning.
He’s blind! A man shouted. I’m not! He cried, I can see!
But he looked back at the sign and saw nothing of substance.
His eyes don’t work! A small boy whispered to his mother; cosmopolitan gossip followed.
He saw nothing of substance.
Now, standing here, in the unrequited present day, he feels the uncontrollable urge to drift.
There’s a stall full of flowers by the wall above the river,
forgotten it seems, as the rest of the stalls are bare.
At night, the petals on each bloom are painted like newspaper; they have no hue.
Shades of purple, red and white are soaked in shadow;
their substance stripped by such simple things.
His feet follow a well known path and soon his eyes meet the glassy water of the Seine.
There’s a stillness to it that he wishes could soak beneath his skin; contaminate his soul.
With a sigh he removes his shoes and places them side by side on the mossy cobblestones.
A cardigan soon sits upon them, and his spotted fingers fiddle with the shape, pulling it to perfect. It’s a lost cause.
Gnarled knuckles he’d never noticed brush the dampness beneath them, and he sees that his clock hand has passed the midnight mark one too many times.
The cracking of his knees prompt his posture to straighten, and he stands, a man above the river.
The chill is frightening, but still he lets himself fall.
Ripples strike the balls of his feet like knives, and their brothers shave lament upon his forehead as he cuts through a body he does not belong in.
His eyes fall shut and his lips let the water in, pleading it to crucify.
There was no weight tied upon his ankles or feet; a struggle was refused,
for in him, the natural instinct of man to thwart and flee the scythe’s cruel blade had perished long before.
He sank with all the company of heaven, with angels, archangels, and beloved disbelievers;
with dying skin and cremated hope, and without a shred of regret.
As his skin bloomed violet, and consciousness tore quickly away,
he wondered, his last harbored thought:
Do the dead ask where you ended like the living ask where you’re from?
If so, to both beginnings, he’d respond:
Paris, in the wintertime.
The Mire 