Riding behind him it comes back to me

like a kindness, this feeling
 

of hearing a song I’d forgotten

but know the words to—or my mouth does,
 

the way my legs know to keep pedaling

so I’m free to look out at the river, or at Jacques’s back
 

shifting from side to side. Overhead, the late afternoon sun

strobes between red metal beams like an old film reel,
 

catching the couples who crowd the bridge in such flashes of gold and shadow

even the breeze seems cinematic, how it teases
 

all the little hairs on my arms lifting in chorus
 

and my pack so light I’m sure I’ve left something behind—

but only my worry, and only for a moment.
 

###
 
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures. His poems have appeared in the American Reader, Linebreak, the Los Angeles Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
 
“Reprise” was originally published in The Glutton’s Kitchen (TLR Summer 2014)