Metro, Juin

We were from Kalamazoo.

Paris was still a movie set,

light doing what it does

in paintings, on postcards —

we were headed somewhere cheerful,

the plan was sightseeing,

the afternoon was everything.

Then: squealing brakes.

Shouts. The platform

across the tracks

going suddenly wrong.

It took us a moment.

The French came fast and official

and meant nothing —

except one word.

At the far end of the opposite platform,

something dark at the edge of the car.

People standing

the way people stand

when they cannot move.

We were shuffled back up,

out to the street,

into the June heat —

not yet the full weight of summer

but getting there.

We didn’t talk much.

We continued the plan.

That’s the thing I can’t explain —

how the afternoon just

folded us back in,

the city indifferent,

a café somewhere,

light on the Seine doing

what light does.

And underneath it:

could I have seen it coming

in someone I loved?

Could I see it in myself?

We were from Kalamazoo.

We didn’t know yet

that somewhere in every system

someone is at the edge,

and the trains

don’t stop in time,

and the afternoon

continues anyway,

and you let it,

because what else

do you do.