Faith Franckenstein

Is she still Faith Franckenstein? Is she still the past somewhere between Frankfort, Kansas, and LA? Le Moulin du Soleil Ermenonville; her mom’s haunt with Harry Crosby, winter ’29, also haunted, still haunted. Those open fields haunted. The Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Faubourg darknesses and weeping willows, the drizzled cul-de-sacs. Is she still of memories thus deleted, giving her a certain absent aura, tall-shouldered? An uncertain world of make-believe made more believable, I wanna say. Those whims and glossy chance encounters, tossing caution to the wind. As such, a darkened moonless night, down by South Beach sans the Verrazzano, c. ’61. We plunged headlong, skinny-dipping in the languid surf with dreams of no tomorrows, no eternities. None but those decades lessened, disappeared. Those moments becoming one less and less. The near-to-next impossibility. The careless and carefree. The half-remembered face. The voice also half-remembered. Her hair way past shoulder-length, soft, satiny. Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility”tout passé. The midnight skinny-dip.