Page 20 - Contrast1997

To Paris

In memory of sixteen students from Montoursville, PA,
killed on the TWA crash of 1996

I.
I wonder if they waited at the airport like we did,
throats choked with anticipation, eyes darting
like a nervous bird's. Minutes away-
a six-hour trip from provinciality to Paris.
They held their lives in leather cases,
as we had done so tentatively. Our mouths
had filled with bile, and we tasted ourselves
as never before.

II.
We squeezed into seats and nibbled airplane
food like mice with cheese, and feared the toilet.
How long were they sustained by trivialities
until they knew-was it intense heat,
an unbearable stinging and ripping apart
of every cell? We need to know-we, who awakened
in another land as new people. We didn't think
of being alive, only of being too tired to traipse
around Paris in the rain.

III.
Now in that city there are ghostly images-
teenagers dodging cars around L'Arc de Triomphe,
exhilirated faces wet and shining; bedmates,
once strangers, now insomniacs together
on the first night away, listening to their
hearts thump feverishly home home home.

18