Each morning, before the sun rises
over the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer
on the Côte d’Azur, cruise ships drop anchor
so that motor launches from shore
can nurse alongside. All afternoon we studied
les structures où nous sommes l’objet, structures
in which we are the object—le soleil
me dérange, le Côte d’Azur nous manque—
while the pompiers angled their Bombardiers
down to the sea, skimming its surface
like pelicans and rising, filled
with water to drop on inland, inaccessible
wildfires. Once, a swimmer was found face down
in a tree like the unfledged robin I saw
flung to the ground, rowing
its pink shoulders as if in the middle
of the butterfly stroke, rising a moment
above water. Oiseau is the shortest word
in French to use all five vowels: “the soul
and tie of every word,” which Dante named
auieo. All through December, a ladybug circles
high around the kitchen walls looking for
spring, the way we search for a word that will hold
all vows and avowals: eunoia, Greek
for “beautiful thinking,” because the world’s
a magic slate, sleight of hand—now
you see it, now you don’t—not exactly
a slight, although in Elizabethan English, “nothing”
was pronounced “noting.” In the Bodleian Library
at Oxford, letters of the alphabet hang
from the ceiling like the teats
of the wolf that suckled Romulus
and Remus, but their alibi
keeps changing, slate gray like the sea’s
massage: You were more in me than I was
in me. . . . You remained within while I
went outside. Hard to say
whether it was Augustine
speaking to God or my mother
talking to me. Gulls ink the sky
with view, while waves throw themselves
on the mercy of the shore.
