Road 2 Elsewhere, Excerpt #35*: "License my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below."

John Donne is one of the great things about being an English major.

THE FRANKNESS OF LIFE, of appetite, in Paris, had been evident when I hit the streets on day one. In U.S. grocery stores, a shiny plastic veneer shielded me from the key ingredient in a bird for my mom's chicken fricassee: Death. Along any shopping street in Paris, the recently guillotined birds were draped along store facades, and a tang of rot hung in…