I’m eyeing the ceiling counting
chocolates, pâte de fruit like a row
of sugared suns, willows with their
trailing fronds along the Seine,
willows where our ancestors
may have slept high up before
that tumbling sensation I’m feeling
now, letting go to the green-minded
grandeur and the orderly formation
of lindens bordering Place des Vosges,
their first branches holding hands
like us lying here touching shoulders,
legs, feet, and I’m already across
a table from you with a crisp fish,
the eye clouded over like the contours
of marble, a duck-filled pond, or late
evening clouds as we pick the last ash
from goat cheese as others have done
in their histories of smoke
and stations, and after the last sip
of wine, you stand and I’ll consider:
oyster shell, the surface of a soufflé,
rain, the end of a baguette, the spine
of a book, and you in a long wool coat.
–
Janine Certo is the author of O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (Longleaf Press, 2023); Elixir, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021); and In the Corner of the Living, runner-up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2017). She is an associate professor at Michigan State University.