Swallows

in the café on Rue Lepic, I sit with a little green fairy in front of me, the absinthe gone louche and cloudy now, a slow swirling storm in the glass that brings its own dull and necessary release from the absolute.

the flavours move through the mouth in their old way — fennel and star anise and black liquorice and the grand wormwood — all punching gently, the way old roads punch gently when you have walked them long enough.

and I write about Paris
and those little cathedrals that rise and fall
in the mind
like thoughts you cannot quite hold.

the water drips slow, the only sound that matters, melting the sugar, clouding everything, and that dripping bounces inside my ardent skull — an acute, hard, hurting little rhythm from somewhere deep in the zone, each small drop holding the sway of a whole distant ocean, the vast and the tiny in the same moment, the same breath, the same tired and beautiful evening.

the waitress keeps her eye on the empty glass and fills it again without asking, keeps me topped up and moving forward, tells me small stories between tables and takes the cash with a quick sure hand — ever so helpful, the way people are when the light is going down and nobody wants to be alone just yet.

and then my eyes are becoming.

outside the swallows cut low in long soft droves past the passage brothel, through the narrow alley and up to their mud nests under the eaves, and I watch her floral skirt moving with them, lingering in the last low slip of the sunset, a low-altitude migration of its own across the warm stones of Montmartre.

swallows to their nests,
her floral skirt in the dusk—
no one home but me.