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)