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 métro-

I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tagines

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,

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 speaks.

I have slept against my reflection.

I have pretended a bored sleep.

But once I raised my head

and saw, I swear, a woman wearing falling snow.

She glowed supernova in a slip.

Not a knot or a kiln or a boat ramp

but a dress from the silver water of the moon

and a liquid shape, each way free.

Not wine-lips red or cricket black,

but blue-shadowed pearl-white silk,

a dress of movie light,

a dress that's all of May,

the force of curve, all liquid words,

a whirly night sea's murmur-

then at once the doors leapt open

and in that hiss like a wave pulling back on the sand,

she was gone.

Yet in a city of crows, my ribs marimba'd,

at that temple door, I was accordion-lunged.

I saw a candle-lit woman in the fluorescent métro,

a woman like a sudden pillar of doves.