Hotel du Louvre

1

A fifth-floor garret suite

with a jagged rooftop

skyline just across

the street.

2

Monet, Renoir, Manet,

Gauguin, Van Gogh,

plus many others we didn’t know:

late afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay.

3

Tramping along—across—the Seine,

cutting through

the Louvre,

getting our American confidence back again.

4

Beef tartare on a balcony

of the Louvre. Mist-machines along that nice

fake beach, the Paris

Plages. The Eiffel Tower a spaceship at night.

5

Those rooftops across the way rainy gray. Sky

just slightly bluer. Too much wine last night.

Outside the highest window, someone’s bothered

to put out bright-red potted flowers.

—

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. Poems of his have appeared recently in The Wayfarer and Leaves of Ink. His chapbook In Stereo appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.