It’s Always Been Big

My wife sleeps on a pillow wide as this city,
but only I get to sleep on it with her—draped
as we are over the streets, avenues, boulevards
and the hundreds of thousands who wave red
hearts from the skyscrapers and the old tenement
houses once white as the Milky Way. Darling,
the paradoxes of this Universe love us endlessly.

In the Luxembourg Garden I Check My Watch
 
You’ll be here soon, coming over
from Rivoli, wearing the red beret
you wanted to buy a week ago.
I have our lunch in tow and you’ll
find me walking around the basin,
counting every paper boat there is
and contemplating the timelessness
that will still exist long after we’re
gone—this is Paris, after all, but I
assure you the ham sandwiches will
get their share of attention, the future
street sign bearing our names near
the shop I bought them at will display
its mustard color flame like a sunflower.

Tim Suermondt is the author of four full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007), Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), Election Night And The Five Satins (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and The World Doesn’t Know You, published by Pinyon Publishing in late 2017. His fifth book, Josephine Baker Swimming Pool, will be released by MadHat Press in January 2019. He has poems published in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, and Stand Magazine (England), among others. He is a book reviewer for Cervena Barva Press and a poetry reviewer for Bellevue Literary Review. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.