You are very, very donkey,
he tells me. His friends laugh
like hell, the girls take him
by the arm saying, Donkey, no.
Pretty. Pretty. He comes to make
the correction. Our common tongue
is high school French, then a confusion
of my fledgling Spanish, by
summer’s end we have our own
language, more unspoken. He sings
Don’t go breakin’ my heart, rehearses
meeting my mother: Hello,
it is nice to meet you.
He lives by the market of stacked fish
and hanging meat, peaches I never taste
again. On the open roof playing
guitar near cotton shirts
on the clothesline, I can see
his flat around the curve
of whitewashed allies. He cries
when I am leaving, asks me
to come back, be an olive farmer’s
wife. It is a story he tells us:
he is not an olive farmer but a
mathematician, working in a
language as mysterious as our own.