Three O’Clock

Paris, April. Green dark afternoons.

The woman kneeling on cardboard has hands rougher than the stones beneath her. Her scarf slips as she bows.

*

Some grass in Paris asks not to be touched; there are signs everywhere. Pelouse Interdite. The forbidden lawns dream themselves, perfect and alone. The grass only grows at night.

*

Once I lay on that grass with someone. It was April, late in the afternoon. We thought we were invisible or exempt or in love – all three feel the same at nineteen. The whistle was sharp; the guard’s hand gestured – up, out, away.

*

My grandmother’s hands were pale. Summer after summer, they burned and peeled. She used to say some bodies don’t know how to take in light.

*

The woman prays at three o’clock. I’ve been walking past her for three weeks. Her hands cup air and offer it upward.

*

On the grass that day your hand moved along my spine; sun through the leaves made circles of light on our arms. Us laughing as we stood after the whistle, brushing off nothing. The grass showing no trace of us.

*

The sudden green dark of April afternoons. Black umbrellas passing. I don’t have one; rain soaks my hair through to the shoulders – cold at the collarbone.

*

The woman kneels. I walk past with my library books, in my flimsy shoes; in my handbag there are coins I could give her.

*

The guard told us: ‘Le gazon, c’est interdit.’ The grass, it is forbidden. We joked the grass itself was the crime: that wanting to lie down in something beautiful was the problem.

*

Tu me manques. The person you miss is doing the action. You are missing from me.

*

What I didn’t tell you on the grass: my grandmother was already sick. That I was only in Paris to be away from the not-sick-yet, the still-pretending. That when you touched my spine I thought about vertebrae, about what holds us up.

*

I loved you, but not far enough past the edges of myself.

*

Three o’clock. The woman’s scarf is the green of hospital curtains. For three weeks I’ve been choosing which side of the street to walk on.

*

Today my feet just stop. I kneel on the cardboard beside her, my shoes still damp from yesterday’s rain. She turns and her hands reach for my face; she wipes away tears I didn’t know were falling. Her hands, rougher than the stones.

*

The grass grows wild in the dark.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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