‘Just Like A Woman’

Of course I’d been to Paris
before, but not without supervision.
And if Dylan ever had a dry patch
this was it, which meant the club
was intimate, tickets cheap
and the young among us shoved
upfront, thrilled, skin on skin.
Electric guitar, him in a lurex suit
tootling at the piano a while. So close
my fingers could’ve been crushed
by his white patent rock-star brogues
stamping a beat. And what I know is
at the first strums of my favourite song
(which would lose its shine when
I got fired up about misogyny
but that was later, not then) as he filled
his lungs to sing Nobody feels any pain
he looked directly at me –
with Dylan I was living the phrase
we locked eyes – at which point
in the story my husband always replies
Yeah right. But he was late on the scene
the one I married and green-eyed
over the Legend who saw me first:
nineteen, alone in Paris,
singing my heart out without
the slightest inkling of ache or break.