À Bout de Souffle

There is still a photograph of lovers I would like to forget. 

After all, the unsentimental oak trees & billboards flash past

On the freeway as I drive home. The photograph

Is by Brassaï & probably it depicts a prostitute & her pimp

On the Boulevard des Invalides in 1934. What her employment was

No longer matters to me or to anyone else, but what troubles me

Is an expression of enormous tenderness & care which covers

Her face as she looks through him. He is handsome, but he is also 

In my opinion—nothing, & a star—a blank gust of wind from

Normandy—with his manner as studied & tough as

Belmondo’s was in the first Breathless. The shadows of colonnades

And the shadows over the Seine go past him; he never sees them. And

This punk in the Brassaï print photograph cares more about his coat &

The angle of his cigarette than he does for human life. You

Can see that from the quickest & most indifferent glance.

Probably, it isn’t much of a photograph, but the two of them are

Saying goodbye to each other & neither of them knows it yet. So why 

Do I worry about them both? Perhaps I love them; I don’t know.

I am ashamed to admit this, but no woman ever looked at me 

The way she is looking at him. Perhaps no man

Could stand it for long if she did. Behind them, it is over &

The street is dark. But still her expression will not change.

It is odd, now, & I envy her, not him. And I know he’s gone

By now, shot down by the police in an alley where the bricks suddenly

Seemed, to his eye, pockmarked by the splashes of cement, full

Of detail & a significance he never had time to figure out. 

Both he and his assassin would tell you that the whole thing was a terrible

Mistake, an avenue turning into the indignity of blood 

Smeared on brick in curves, arabesques & a spattered constellation of blood—

While the indifferent pigeons strutted about them along the ledges

Of the buildings, & then it was, after all, dawn & they were

Gray in the gray light. Which is what allows him to stroll a while now,

Through the penny arcades of heaven & those little shooting galleries

With the fake ducks, & always a beer on the counter with no one

There to drink it—a beer which no one is given the time

To finish—because, after all, this is heaven & what you see last

You see forever: even if that is only 3 stick figures of blood on brick. And he is 

Wind by comparison. That woman still lives here, on this street,

The soft lamplight falling over her face—whose expression,

I suddenly understand, only became serious twenty seconds before

The shutter fell, & enclosed her forever, leaving the rest of us out—

Anyway, it is too cold to leave in the photograph, it is winter,

And, unless you are that woman or I am that man who already owns the pallor

Of the dead, the street is empty for blocks & I couldn’t possibly

Know a thing about either of them. All of which I call my ignorance,

And an obscure, troubled, unphotographable life. I mean, a poetry.