Tuesday Night In Montparnasse

…These nights / I harbor a secret pity for the moon,
— Dorianne Laux

A man outside a café is putting his gloves on slowly, tugging
the leather over his wrist, and he is, perhaps, waiting for me
to put my knife and fork down, to come out from behind
my FACTS ABOUT THE MOON and slurried plate, because we have

been alone this dinner, watching that couple toast teaspoons.
We have watched them from our swampy corners, sugar
speckling her lips while she stirs her coffee, the oil-haired man
stirring too. Tonight, he will hold her cleanly in the dark

bowl of his pelvis. She will rest herself there, clutching his kinks,
whispering darling. Strangers, eating alone together estranged in
old cities are complicit in the nuances of other strangers’ loves—
we want to come together tugging our guardedness on

like wool scarves, our tongues coated with the unsayable,
and this German man daring me one reflective iris from under
the brim of his cap is watching me watch the screening
of his hairless pulse. Flurries collect between us. I do not know

if I understand enough to leave the warm place too, to leave
where I have robed my heart in whisky, to step to the other side

of the glass just long enough to ask him for a cigarette, and then
a light, or just to gesture to the lovers, as if to ask, can you believe
it? Tonight, the glass divides me from that woman sitting
with gold lettering on her forehead, her black hair heavy on

the outsider’s chest, and when he closes his buttons, her face
falls through his fingers. My mouth ripples leather. Dorianne
says she harbors a secret pity, and though I know
she means the moon, I want to believe it’s me she’s thinking

of, growing further from myself, because now he is stepping
away and my reflection is shrinking, the moon of his wrist
eclipsed in window’s winter—and I bow my head down
to read: alone in space without, and Forget us… After all

we’ve done. I tug my pork through the gravy, work
my knife down soaking flesh. She croons, you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it, and under
the silver, my plate sings, the hot ceramic cracking.