My children have grown and live separate from me in exile. I haven’t seen them, nor the
         children they’ve had.
The broken mountains have become neutral.

I have in my possession his diary, a sack of the clothing they cut from his body, the
       photograph taken
         before the war, and I call it the war now, I no longer call it the struggle.

Our house has fallen and the debris prevents me from digging up what we buried behind
       it many years ago.

Please, when you write, describe again how I looked in the white dress that improbable
       morning
         when my random life was caught in a net of purpose.

Here you live in an atelier beside Simone’s overlooking the cemetery.
Here you are in exile but can’t afford to buy a clock.
Here at cafe tables you write letters to the disappeared and, worse, mail them.
Here you taste rascasse, a fish you never will have tasted.
Here you open your arms when the man who might have loved you comes.

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an
       experience all the way to the end.

As the last helicopter lifted away from the deck of the Manitowac and the ship turned

Bonsoir, madame. Je m’appelle Ellie.

A colander of starlight, the sky in that part of the world.

A wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.

Bonsoir. Est-ce que je vous dérange?

On the contrary, I’m happy to practice speaking.

Then you aren’t French. How fortunate for me. I couldn’t have shared this room with a
       French woman.

While the white phosphorous bombs plumed into the air like ostrich feathers of light
       and I cursed you for
         remaining there without me, for tricking me into this departure.

Parlez-vous français? Est-ce que vous le parlez bien?

So beautiful, ma’am, from here, the sailor said, if you don’t stop to think.

And it went on like that all night, questions in French, and it went on, radiant white
       feathers along the coast of Lebanon, until Ellie slept.

How can one confuse that much destruction with one woman’s painful life?

Est-ce que je vous dérange? she asked. Et pourquoi des questions?

Because in French there is no auxiliary verb corresponding to our English did

         As in

Did you wait for him to come back? and Did he return from the war alive?

         Or

Did you decide in Beirut to go on without him?

As if someone not alive were watching:
Bonsoir. Est-ce que je vous dérange?

Night terrors. A city with all its windows blank.
A memory through which one hasn’t lived.

You see, I told Madame about my life.
I told her everything.
And what did she say?

PART II

The Notebook of Uprising

“What will be is not; and what would be;
what was, what might have been, they are not.”

—PAUL VALÉRY, Parables