Stripes

that psychic businessman in Paris in a three-piece brown suit
who stopped outside the Ritz
where the wind rose up, in Paris, and with it my raincoat;
I was nineteen then

and his friend stood a few feet behind, laughing,
shaking his hand with the cigar in it, a rich black briefcase in the other,

(the man talking to me had a brown alligator briefcase)

saying his name, saying to come on, let it
go, it’s just a girl, laisse-la, oh la la; but the man in brown,
kept looking me in the face, impassioned, alert,
speaking softly, urgently, saying, Grace a bon Dieu qui m’a donné ces yeux, (he looked like Rilke, with his pince-nez, his thin frame)

                                                and I was
trying to follow him, I wanted to, in those phrases like half-gasps I emitted,
forgetting all my French in the gathering rain; and watched him,
realizing how far behind the sense of his words I was
even though I understood him and wanted to.

                                                He looked at me with Rilke’s eyes and said
with a sweet, resigned sadness, Even though you do not understand,
you are the most charming person, woman, he’d ever met,
he wanted me to know, and that if things were different — under different circumstances —

            his friend had stopped guffawing here, stopped swinging his rich black briefcase and turned to look at Cartier’s jewelry cases; this was serious; — he would
 
            leave all that he had behind, leave it all, and follow me to the ends of the world.

I was nineteen and stared at him on that cobblestoned corner in Paris, my hands finding the lining of coat pockets, and going cold.

I can’t remember how we left it, except I think he grabbed my hands to further make his point.
I have tried speaking about this three times.  Each time my listeners laughed until I saw the joke in it too.  Yes, of course, how ridiculous.  Yes, a pickup.  Yes, I see your point.  So I believe I have never spoken about this.  Now periodically, when things aren’t working out for me, I stop and think to my man in brown in Paris, how he saw me when I couldn’t see myself.

And I think of my husband Tom,
whom I call Your Grace, who cares
what happens in this world,
about his children, the news — they lay garlands at my feet, he called
to say after a meeting — and I love him for it.
             Your Grace,
I fling out on occasion, all the while thinking of
things I saw in a stable years ago
when I owned a black horse,
the grass and green, the late afternoon
light on the hay bales flooding them like honey,
while the anxious horses nickered for their meal

And then the horse named Stripes
whom they had castrated that
morning
            (I’d never kissed a boy and my hair was long)
                       Stripes running from one end
            of the arena to the other, Blood running down
            his legs (I thought at first he missed his pony friend,
            because they were never apart), but the blood ran down
            his legs and Stripes shrieking hollow and thick, but there was no one to hear
            (I was at the fence now, fingers in my pockets)
                       the jiggling blood as I followed the toss and snort of his head,
            he ran up to the fence and away again as if there were no one there to hear
                        or as if he were a ghost, reckless and abandoned,
            his neck and eyes swollen as he ran, not stopping,
            like a wooden horse of infinite feeling, infinite pain.


(published in Let Me Tell You Where I've Been, Univ. of Arkansas Press)