O pretty girl in blue,
who once sauntered along the rue tronchet in a shredded levi's
like a bedtime story bellowed from a midnight's rooftops,
a wayfarer delirious with the impish pleasures of escape
as a family of boucherons behind glass watched transfixed
and a pearly silver prius winked from across the street,
a nikon around your neck, an emerald on the right index,
immeasurable eyes like fingered shapes in sand
adorned by the reckless geometry of a chuckle,
you were a compelling disruption of an anonymous evening,
a wayward verse scribbled of a dreamy indifference,
a brown-eyed habit born of a glorious ignorance.
My words here are but mere elegant gondolas
navigating the vast stormy seas of randomness,
an obdurate memory on a fanciful voyage
so if you ever stumble upon these orphaned thoughts
on a neighbour's screen at an airport
or a ragged page fluttering by a sidewalk,
thank the magnanimity of life's quirky fates for me,
for the artless harmony that is chance, the persistence that is memory
and the ceaseless resonance that is a wide-eyed stranger's smile.
[9th October, 2010
Paris, 5:49 pm]