A man stoops on the sidewalk to pluck up

a wedding band.  “Is this your ring?” he calls.

“No,” I say.  I head down the Rue Royale.

That’s the third ring I’ve been offered today.

Paris is rich in rings—somebody’s sure

to find one on the pavement at your feet.

You’re meant to think it’s valuable and claim it,

then pay a small “reward” to the finder.

Rings are on my mind when I reach the church

of the Madeleine, and climb the crowded steps

looking for the spot where my parents poised

for their wedding photo after the war.

New rings gleamed on their joined hands

as they stood smiling in army uniforms.

My father’s ring was a plain gold band,

my mother’s sparkled with a small diamond.

Her ring slipped off her finger in her eighties

when she was shopping.  She never found it.

My father’s?  Buried with him? Given away?

 

A red-haired woman jostles me, then kneels,

pretending to find something.  “Is this yours?”

she cries out.  She holds up a shiny ring.

I should just laugh--but it feels uncanny.

My heart skips, as if she’d somehow conned

these atoms out of invisibility

after their perilous trip through a time machine.

Are my parents here, too, just out of sight?

The woman’s palm trembles as she shows me

the golden bait.  Will I take it?  “No, no, no.”

 

 

 

Funny—to stand in my yard,

hose pointed at the ground.

I don’t want to wet the man

who’s stopped to talk to me,

claiming he owned my house

decades ago.  He tilts his cap

to view the Norway pine

grown tall as a steeple.

“I loved this house!” he says.

Turns out he had children here,

two dogs, a cat named Fetch.

He adores the gambrel roof,

grey clapboards, red shutters.

He remembers the floor plan,

the easy slant of the staircase,

how the morning sun

splashes the front bedroom.

There’s a new deck, I say,

but your old boiler still spits

steam through baseboard pipes.

He laughs.  Says he watched

possums courting at night

from the kitchen nook.

Meanwhile the house eyes us—

so many glittering windows,

indifferent to our human rights.

We might be a pair of crows

flapping about as we peck

bits of trash from the mud.

No, he won’t come in—that’s all.

He limps away—goodbye again.

 

 

I’ve walked around this lake for fifty years

always turning right through the dry wetlands

near the Cedar bridge.  Flocks of wild geese

feed on the meadow now, each with a sentinel

craning its long neck to watch my progress,

and warn the others if I leave the sidewalk.

Strange, I’ve wandered longer here than the geese

who never came here when I was a girl.

I guess they’ve learned to avoid the countryside

on their migrations south.  Here in the city

guns are for other people, so the geese

can rest their turbulent wings on leafy lawns,

while I’ve got my cell phone, just in case

somebody’s lurking behind that wall of willows—

and there’s the bench where my mother sat

back when she could walk, and there’s the field

returned to swaying wildflowers and bird calls

where my brothers practiced with their new bows

shooting arrows into bales of yellow hay.

In winter the city built a warming shed.

Wobbly in stiff white figure-skates, I’d totter

down the ramp on freezing nights and glide out

past hockey players to the cloudy patch

closer to the bridge, smooth but dangerous,

hoping my clawed toes wouldn’t catch the ice.

 

Now here’s Cedar, where I wait for the light,

with dog walkers and Moms with strollers,

letting them leave me behind as I dawdle

half in the present, half in the past,

able to hear the roar of the airplanes

flying low over the lake as they approach runways

only if I make an effort, the noise so familiar

it might be thirty years ago or now.

I follow the path up the only hill to a spot

where I can see the whole footprint-shaped lake

with the crown of downtown skyscrapers

hovering like Oz on the horizon,

then down again to a hidden spit of beach

where the wind whips up some waves into froth

imitating the ocean I once longed to cross,

and did, again and again—but now I’m back.

A wild gabbling startles me.   I look up.

Geese fill the air.  Today’s flocks, having rested,

are heading down to their winter demesnes,

preparing to cross the miles of America

south of here, the wet lands and state parks

where it’s true, hunters doze with binoculars

in the woods, but where others, like you,

looking out your kitchen window at dawn,

thrill to the vast deep moan of their migration.