Twelve miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, there's a lake and a suburb named Crève Coeur. (Back there they pronounce it "creev coor".) In French, crève coeur means a painful deception, or, more literally, heart break. Crève Coeur Lake, near St. Louis, is shaped like a broken heart, and the story is that an Indian princess threw herself off the cliffs into it and drowned, after an affair with a Frenchman. I was in that area recently on business, and this is what happened to me.

1.
Posed in the suburb
on the St. Louis plain
part way between
the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers,
in a mushroom field
of other tall glass
and other reflective shells --
the Holiday Inn, Westport,
near the Ramada Inn, Westport Plaza,
hard by the Westport Mall at
Progress Parkway.
The concept here is Westport,
but then
in the stainless steel elevator,
with 101 strings
faking Smokey Robinson
from the first floor
all the way to the second,
I read, off the posted operator's license,
my real address:
Holiday Inn, Crève Coeur
. . .

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Cover photo: Last Day of Autumn, by TrailLink user dierdorf33, courtesy of Rails-to-Trails Conservancy