Antonio D’Alfonso

10.04.02

Paris is far, so is Rodin’s Secret,
those lovers’ hands that caress one another
without touching, and still touching
is touching, a whisper that encompasses what
can’t be confined, my home is a city of confinement,
though the cage is invisible and the bars glittering.
Paris is a secret that unfolds within like a whisper,
and the walls fall apart when the taxi driver smiles
and the waiters laugh: This restaurant
is a lover’s sex for poets to kiss. What lips
have we touched today? No price to fix
on the works Paris promises.
In the atrium, the workers of joy.
Above us, the aristocrats of history snore.
One leaves and one gives, one takes and one breaks.
No photograph can capture the multi-dimensions
of those fingers that touch without touching.
My city is a haven for replicas where touching is killing.

—from Rattle #20, Winter 2003
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