La Tour Eiffel. An April-snow
like pollen covers
a patch of stolid tulips.  

From the first platform, he leans
over slick railings,
leans as if in Keats’s scheme

to drop and drop a red corsage
to a woman below.  
I see it now: this is the one

of 300 steel workers, who tumbled
to his death clowning around.
Her promise is to keep him

from his fall by gazing back –
his sentinel, his figurine
against the filmy wash of elements

against the fading colors in a dome.
I shake it – not for snow –
but to marvel at their hold.