How strange that where you read a thing so often ends up attached to it thereafter. Here we have a feeling of not-quite-fitting-in that slowly settles in the chest.
TO A FRENCH STRUCTURALIST
There’s no modesty, Todorov,
in the park where I read:
the young mothers and working girls
raise their skirts and open their blouses
to the sun while the children play,
the old men doze, and I wrestle
with your Poetics. When I look again,
perhaps they’ll all be naked;
they’ll make for the seesaw and jungle gym,
bosoms swinging and long legs flashing
in the midday light. Ah, that clerk
at the Préfecture de Police
looked at me with such disdain
when he asked what I was doing in Paris!
It was a lie, Todorov,
when I shrugged and said, “Nothing.”
— DAVID KIRBY
