What the song doesn’t say: romance
will cost you. Both sides are forced to pay
unequally: a picnic ruined
when day-old strawberries were found
to be wanting, the cheese monger
unloading seventeen euros’ worth
of farm-fresh cow and goat instead
of that modest chunk of Livarot
we’d been craving. Always someone
wanting more than another’s able
to deliver, the afternoon
casting shadows even as we ran
around the arcing latticed base
of the Eiffel Tower, unaware
memory’s irrational assault
was underway where the calm river
bends, the body contemplating
feelings divorced from a mind pickled
in last night’s binge—half-remembered
pleasures that returned as a pygmied
throng—a carcass slit from anus
to throat where the steaming entrails spilled
into the dust. And if we drank
to the dream of an eternal love
over sautéed chanterelles, kir
royales fizzing up the fluted glass
as we carved into foie gras baked
in pastry modeled into a crusty
house (my marriage over)—La note,
s’il vous plaît—we had indeed grown fat
for slaughter, would taste a deeper salt.