She asked me to bring her back a stone
from Paris, where even the dirt is historic,
but I wanted, instead, to find her the color
of l'heure bleu, the shimmer of twilight

with the streetlamps coming on, the way they keep
the dark back for just a little while, the reflections
of headlamps and taillights, red and gold, on the Champs
d'Élysees wet with rain and a fog rising.

And there's the way the past becomes a stone,
how you carry it with you, lodged in your pocket.
The blue light deepens, evening's melancholy shawl,
the wide boulevard of the Seine, the way the stones

of the monuments become watery, ripple in the currents
and the wind. Everything seems eternal here,
to us from the West, who have no memory of dates
like 52 BC, 1066, the fin de siècle

as we barge on towards the millennium,
history's crazy swirl, oil on pavement,
a promenade down les Grands Boulevards.
This is what I'd bring back: shadows of stones,

twilight longings, a handful of crushed lilacs
from the bar at the Closerie, some lavender de Provence,
Odilon Redon's chalky mauves, a jazz piano playing the blues,
Mood Indigo; just a condensation of blue,

distilled in a small glass bottle with a stopper,
as if it came from an expensive parfumerie,
musk of the centuries, the gathering dusk,
a hedge against night, the world that will end.

'And now for a few words about writing: The "she" in this poem was the sitter we hired for our 15 year old son with autism, so that we could go to Paris, where my husband was to receive an award for one of his patents, and this was her request for a souvenir. I wrote the poem BEFORE the trip, at VCCA, reading novels and guidebooks and doing a lot of day dreaming. I see the poem (any poem) as a journey, one where you don't know the destination ahead of time, kind of like following a ball of yarn, and see where it unwinds. Or, as in this case, throwing a stone in a pond, and seeing what kind of ripples it sets off.'