Francoise the Maid  

serves up tea and little cakes for Marcel 

hoping in her plucky mawklessness and 

her love for him to skeptic him out of his ponderous head, 

to introduce him to some spunk, not spending his days 

pulling a plum-bucket through the hawthorn to spy 

on some old duchess or other.  

It is not for her, all this dreaming, but sturdy facts

like taking in stride a quivering chicken in the garden, 

a mewling newborn mole on the doorstep, 

the striated scars on the village idiot’s cheek. 

Things a soft child, mind aloft, might shrink from, 

things she wishes he could see, to spirit him out of his seat.  

Marcel slurps over his treats. Francoise’s mouth 

spurts with saliva despite herself, her sense of tidiness. 

She softens her pursing lips, warming to the smell of butter, 

ignoring her morning bloat, hiding a smile lest she look 

too familiar, watching the nervous doe-eyed boy keep his cake afloat.  

She can see the boy down the line, neither dandy nor dolt, 

but a quiet charmer, a do-no-harmer, an effete rememberer, 

solaced by cake in a Paris December, far from her in her 

productive duty, her own idea of beauty.