La Tour Eiffel. An April snow
like pollen covers
a patch of stolid tulips.
From the first platform, he leans
over slick railings,
leans as if in Keats’s scheme
to drop and drop a red corsage
to a woman below.
I see it now: this is the one
of 300 steel workers, who tumbled
to his death clowning around.
Her promise is to keep him
from his fall by gazing back –
his sentinel, his figurine
against the filmy wash of elements
against the fading colors in a dome.
I shake it -- not for snow --
but to marvel at their hold.
Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved.
Forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Vol. 9, Spring 2008.