Faith Franckenstein

        Is she still Faith Franckenstein? Is she still the past

somewhere between Frankfort, Kansas, and LA?

Le Moulin du Soleil Ermenonville; her mom’s haunt

with Harry Crosby, winter ’29,

also haunted, still haunted. Those open fields haunted.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Faubourg darknesses

and weeping willows, the drizzled cul-de-sacs.

Is she still of memories thus deleted,

giving her a certain absent aura, tall-shouldered?

An uncertain world of make-believe made more believable, I wanna say.

Those whims and glossy chance encounters,

tossing caution to the wind.

As such, a darkened moonless night,

down by South Beach sans the Verrazzano, c. ’61.

We plunged headlong, skinny-dipping in the languid surf

with dreams of no tomorrows, no eternities.

None but those decades lessened,

disappeared. Those moments becoming one less and less.

The near-to-next impossibility.

The careless and carefree.

The half-remembered face.

The voice also half-remembered.

Her hair way past shoulder-length, soft, satiny.

Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility” tout passé.

The midnight skinny-dip.