Your Life Twice
parfois
on croit rêver sa vie
deux fois
— Serge Safran
A lace shirt, and young women giggle beneath
your window that looks out on a fountain
spewing water from the mouths of stone
fish.
Is this your mother
or the chamber maid? You’re ill, flushed and
damp, your father outside leading a horse into
the stable, you’re coughing blood,
but none of this is happening. The year fills and empties
and you remain you. The trucks on Ninth Avenue are
noisy as the buses. The tan on your father’s arms
ends just above the elbows,
his biceps milky and strange,
and you’re leaping in an empty parking lot
with a cap pistol, you have friends roaring
behind you, a ruffian army that will burn a city
to the ground. That will string barbed wire
across a wasteland. That will lift stagnant water
to your feverish lips.