IN POSTWAR PARIS

We played backgammon
while having green tea
and poached salmon
by the poplars
watching larkspurs  in Paris
on the deckchair near the Seine
among radiant shadows silence
with a glass case of red wine
while it starts to rain
by the embarrassed knotted trails
along miles of a mossy riverbed
in the airless last day of July
with my friend Alain
a tender hero of the war
for the Marquis Resistance
who saved a group of refugees
on a fascist train heading for death
he tells me of his dreams
in a series of scouting episodes
like gloves of voices replying
from routes of the living dead
he hands to me his hidden memoirs
amid his forbidden bar codes
where the wind blows pages
from a loving exonerated language
he has already said opens
history's disordered doors
through a distance of voices
of chance unknown faces he lead
through marshes, swamps,
up mountains like Hannibal
in the footsteps of Swiss Alps
until his own fall in his mission
when missing for over a year
yet rising from his collapse
on his own fearful amnesia
when he finally writes his memoirs
at home in his own leisure
he autographs for me
in an inked personal signature
his shadow sinks on the sofa
under the window cry of gulls
from winds rustled lightening
on a personal dawn of sole effigies
by the Hamlet skull of those lost
on the earth of our settling algebras
of those in wisdom who have passed
Alain still says "Yes", for all our cost
of long suffering for freedom
in the prisms of our journeying
to end the darkness of fascism
as he reads me of his floating ages
from a language which presages
a future prophecy of Fortinbras.