Union Street cable cars clatter by
and I’m at the café door without
his camera on my shoulder.
Someone has stolen
this phase of my life, snapshots
of this city I’m leaving.

Who will develop the film?
Will he see around the Victorian cornices
and the angled views of a blue bay
to the muted gray Parisian streets
where a brother carried this third eye

through his year of foreign study?
And will this brother’s ghost arise
in the thief’s room, visiting upon him
the grief his death brought home to us,

freezing his memory in so many still frames?
And how will this city look to another
who carries what is lost
over his shoulder?