5.

When we were still young & I was imagining . . .things. . . comme?

You were in Paris doing the quadrille & a clumsy polka with your professor, a flaneur of women's finely tuned bodies, a joli garcon under the street lights of my headroom.

& I was in Hershey, studying Proust & thinking about all the times I should have said this or that or ces, oui? TELL ME WHAT IS FREE? WHAT I CAN PAY ON CREDIT?

You had such a pretty Renee Adoree face, the eyes, reflecting two fluttering life stories that included my naive-boy self with rope-burned hands, a penny for all the drunken ladies who fell on their asses under glass balls & colored garlands while trying to do the can-can & in your last letter to me, you wrote Fitz, I'm fit to be tied with my own pajama legs, the ones with floating trumpets but what am I to do?

Mon cher, you have my heart & does it taste like hard chocolate? But this cruel teacher has my dancing shoes & grades my paper lives with a red pen. The dwarf citrus trees will not be waiting for us in the fall, but it was good to be once loved by a sweet boy like you. It only comes once. An orange will some day fall upon my head & knock me unconscious for another lifetime. In that new world, I will be your fruit. Squeeze me. Do not hang on to the bitter aftertaste of the last life.

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