At eighteen, in Paris, 
I just woke up out of a dream 
just before dawn, and stepped through the long window 
from my cold room with its red silk walls. 
Shivering a little in my dressing gown, 
I leaned on the balustrade 
and, look, overnight a light snow had fallen; 
no car had driven over it yet, it lay in the street 
as white, as innocent, as snow on the open fields. 
Then something approached with a calm rhythm 
of hoof-beats made softer by the snow, the sound 
of a quiet heart. It was a heaped-up wood cart 
pulled by a gray horse who walked along slowly, 
head down, while the driver 
sat at the back of one shaft and hunched over 
to light his cigarette. 
                    From above, I saw clearly 
the lit match in the old man’s cupped hands, its glow 
on his long jaw, the small well of flame 
between his living palms like the flare 
of the soul in his body. He went on 
down the street, and the sky went on 
growing lighter, and I saw how he 
left his dark tracks behind him on the whiteness 
of the snow, just the lines of the two wheels, 
slightly wavering, and the dints of the horse’s hooves 
between them, a writing in an undiscovered 
language, something whose meaning 
we feel sure we know, and still can’t quite 
translate. 
                    When I stepped inside again, 
I stopped thinking about love for a minute — I thought about it 
almost all the time then — and thought instead 
about being alive for a while in a world 
with cobblestones, new snow, and the unconscious 
poem printed by hooves on the maiden street.

Of course I was not yet ready to be grateful.

— Kate Barnes

**********

Ah! Why it took me 40 years to get to Paris, and why I am going alone. I am finally ready to see, to sit, to watch, to hear, to let be, and to be grateful. These are not small lessons in my book, and they do not come without a cost.