Chenonceau

An Italian queen paved the floor in monogrammed tiles,
and now I walk over the eroded remains of her name in my worn sneakers.
In the spiral staircases the half-loosened soles catch the dip
where the king would have stood, where his feet and mine
took pieces of dust as souvenirs.
They never refinished the painted floors--
the gold cowers in the corners, backed up against walls,
defending itself against time--
but the front tower is shrounded in canvas
printed with its own image, and if you look hard you can see through
to the scaffolding bones where they remake, remake.

Now it is october and the vines on the arbor over the terrace
are going yellow and sparse,
and I am thinking from beneath them that this
is how it should be.
I am wearing yellow and still the smaller fish flee from my shadow
as I walk by, and this is okay,
the way the water climbs up the white bricks and descends again
with a grain or two of stone to remember this day.

Maybe someday the rain will come in the windows
and collect in the hollows of someone's initials,
run down the stairs in arcs and turns, a spiraling, carved-out throat,
and catch in the basement,
fish weaving through the window bars.
I think of the swallows' nests hanging lobed and papery
under the lips of the high towers--
will the pigeons huddle in the rafters in Louise's bedroom?
Will they nurse their children on her tears,
knit the crowns of thorns into nests of tapestry fiber?
Someone has scraped their initials into the sand in the garden path,
and now they are gone, and so will be their signature,
and they do not mind this.