behind me a man or at least shape in a sleeping bag in the doorway of a church, his larder spread around him and around that corner four more sleeping bags neatly arranged in the open together perfectly equidistant.

Across a bridge

to the lit wrapped picked over patient

and somewhere in the quiet, quiescent left bank the full rhetorical panoply of sacrifice and bluster:

until another bridge and the dawn or is it France etc rises again: joggers, men with green brooms washing the gutters, the man setting up the Subway for the day with its herby miasma, and me.