It's true that you don't know them--nor do I 

know what I wanted their movement to say 

when I tucked them in an envelope with words



for you. I thought it was my life caught 

in a warm night. I believed myself loved 

by the wan and delicate man you see dancing



against the drop-off behind them all. But you 

can't see that they are on a mountain, that 

just beyond the railings is a ravine, abrupt



and studded with thorn, beyond it, a river, 

dry bed of stone that, by the time you take 

the photo from the envelope, will have filled



with green foam of cold torrents from high 

in the Alps. This is France, you think, as you look 

at the people dancing, but there is nothing of France



visible save one branch of a tree close enough 

to catch in their hair. I could tell you that by the time 

you see this picture, the young girl with the long jaw



launching her bared navel at the lens will have bedded 

the man you're afraid of losing me to. There is food 

on the table, French food, and so more beautiful for that,



green olives in brine, a local cake in paper lace, 

sliced tomatoes that look in the flash like flesh 

with their red spill of curve and seed. I could tell you



they grew not twenty meters from the table 

where you see them, that I picked them one day 

with the small woman who bares her breasts



in this photo because she is about to leave us

and doesn't know any other way to say she is sad. 

They're alive is all you'll say of the scene, which



is to say you feel you're not. It is November 

by the time I've thought to send you the photo, 

by the time I feel myself ready to part with the image.



By then, the woman of the manifest breasts has left us, 

and the one with the dark eyes who loved her 

has darker eyes. Very soon after this dancing stopped,



the man with the hollow cheeks took the girl 

of the ripe navel to his bed because he, like you, 

is so afraid of dying, he invites it daily, to try him.



The girl's last lover was a boy on heroin in Cairo 

with the possible end of them both asleep in his blood,

and now too in the blood of the lover I wanted



to save. Because you are married to a woman 

who insists on wearing her dead sister's clothes, 

you understand that while I am not in this picture,



I am in this picture. Know that I need never see it again 

to see: the incessant knot of the girl's navel is a fist, 

an oily wad of sweet-sour girl flesh, a ball of tissue



I twisted and crushed all of that evening, and since. 

You refuse to remember her name, or his, because you want 

to be my lover again, and the others must be kept



abstract. They were alive you say again, not more, 

because the heart is nothing if not a grave. You want me 

because your wife holds out her familiar wrist to you



in the terrible sleeve of her dead sister's dress, 

because I reach for the gaunt cheek of the man 

who worships at the luminous inch of belly on the girl



who lifts her arms from the body of a boy none of us 

will ever know in Cairo, the girl, who dead center 

in the photo, lifts the potent, mocking extravagance

of her flash-drenched arms, and dances for us all.