plays, novels, poems, autobiography?
Your published work: translations and book reviews who’ll tell what you would not have called your adventures, now that the typing’s over?
You fell in love with Catherine the communist Countess in Budapest, and you followed her back to the South of France. You called her Angel, she used your first name; gave orders.
Words were the way she let you make love to her. She was a wicked octogenarian
who’d flirt with anything that moved, but you were her Parsifal, chaste and loyal.
I met you there, one summer I worked at a card table on a terrace that overlooked
wild grapevines, fig trees, scrub oak, sheltered fluvial passage and small beasts’ roving
—light-years away from air raids, Siberia and antebellum Marxist utopias
you and your young friends once constructed late, in cafes, in your first, true language.
We spoke in English. (French you disdained for an unavowed reason: Vichy? The armistice?)
She sometimes spoke to you in Russian, sometimes Hungarian, deep-voiced, urgent.
She took an overdose of barbiturates the morning you were leaving for Switzerland together: she was ninety-two. You mourned her, and put her affairs in order.
It was her daughter, eighty herself this year, who told me that, this April, in Budapest you died, in the banal suburban site of your family-bound last exile.
One day, in ’83 when I visited, a dark-eyed, buxom, curly-haired novelist came with her newest book to give you, sat like a niece on the purple sofa.
She’d been a two-year-old in the orphanage: her parents, Jewish deportees, left her there.
You read her name forty years later on a much better list: writers’ prizes.
But it was she remembered and searched for you, insisted that you hear her encomiums.
Partisan, scribe and second mother: motherless, childless, you made each other
possible. Without you, less is possible.
You’d disagree. Your monuments, elegies: heroes invent themselves from daily womanhood, though they lose breasts and borders.
Ghazal on Half a Line by Adrienne Rich
In a familiar town, she waits for certain letters, working out the confusion and the hurt in letters.
Whatever you didn’t get—the job, the girl— rejections are inevitably curt in letters.
This is a country with a post office
where one can still make oneself heard in letters.
(Her one-street-over neighbors Mme de Sevigne who almost always had the last word in letters.)
Was the disaster pendant from a tongue one she might have been able to avert in letters?
Still, acrimony, envy, lust, disdain
are land mines the unconscious can insert in letters.
Sometimes more rage clings to a page than she would claim— it’s necessary to remain alert in letters
(an estranged friend donated to a library three decades of her dishing out the dirt in letters)
and words which resonate and turn within
the mind can lie there flattened and inert in letters.
The tightest-laced precisely-spoken celibate may inadvertently shrug off her shirt in letters.
Ex-lovers who won’t lie down naked again still permit themselves to flirt in letters.
What does Anonymous compose, unsigned at night, after she draws the curtain? Letters.
Omelette
You can’t break eggs without making an omelette — That’s what they tell the eggs.
—Randall Jarrell, “A War”
First, chop an onion and saute it separately in melted butter, unsalted, preferably.
Add mushrooms (add girolles in autumn)
Stir until golden and gently wilted.
Then, break the eggs as neatly as possible, crack! on the copper lip of the mixing bowl; beat, frothing yolks and whites together, thread with a filet of cream. You’ve melted
more butter in a scrupulous seven-inch iron skillet: pour the mixture in swiftly, keep flame high as edges puff and whiten.
Lower the flame to a reminiscence.
When I was twenty, living near Avenue D, there were Sunday brunches at four o’clock.
Eggs were the necessary protein hangovers (bourbon and pot) demanded.
Style: that’s what faggots (that’s what they called themselves) used to make dreary illness and poverty glitter. Not scrambled eggs, not fried eggs:
Jamesian omelettes, skill and gesture.
Soon after, “illness” wouldn’t mean hangovers.
How many of those glamorous headachy chefs sliding perfect crescents onto disparate platters are middle-aged now?
Up, flame, and push the edges in carefully: egg, liquid, flows out toward the perimeter.
Now, when the center bubbles thickly spoon in the mushroom and onion mixture—
though the Platonic ideal omelette has only hot, loose egg at its heart, with fresh herbs, like the one that Lambert Strether lunched on, and fell for that lost French lady.
Those were the lunchtime omelettes Claire and I (three decades after the alphabet avenue brunch) savored at the women’s bookshop/ salon de the, our manila folders
waiting for coffee—Emily Dickinson’s rare tenses and amphibious metaphors.
Browned, molten gold ran on the platter: a homely lyric, with salad garland.
Outside, it rained in June, or was spring for a brief February thaw. Now the bookshop’s one more Left Bank restaurant, with books for “atmosphere”: omelettes aren’t served there....
With (you’ve been using it all along) a wood spatula, flip one half of the omelette over the girolle-garnished other.
Eat it with somebody you’ll remember.
Maggy Calhoun
Black/olive argyle cotton, long-sleeved, cropped at the waist, a bleach-blot in the weave where some mornings urgent coffee slopped over what I was reading onto its sleeve.
I’d put it on over my old black jeans wet, gray July mornings at the gite in Mailly-le-Chateau, discreetly head for the counter of the one cafe-tabac, before submitting to a day overdetermined by Americans.
The caffeine jolt was perfumed by Gitanes smoked by the patron while counting out the just-delivered Yonne Republicaine , and, from the bakery next door, by bread.
French Food
para Rafael
Mostly it starts as peasant food like your fried plantains, ropa vieja, asapao—
“There’s no part of a pig that cant be used,” more often farmyard porker than wild boar, but both have got ears, trotters, kidneys, guts. You’d let your tough old hen or sinewy beef diced with onion, garlic, lard, potato, simmer in rough red plonk that’s everyday fare for farmers, part of a soldier’s rations— why vineyards first were planted by the Romans. Turnips, onions, parsnips, cabbage, beets; down south, tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes: what grows reliably, proliferates (attracting rabbits, those edible vermin).
Your capon might roast in the baker’s oven till you all came back from the fields at noon. Now another system is imposed:
CEOs of MacDo and Pizza Hut
affirm on the financial page: “Your children
will eat this, whether you like it or not.”
Alto Solo
Dear one, it’s a while since you turned the lights out on the porch: a decade of separate summers passed and cast shed leaves on whatever river carried our letters.
Merely out of habit, I sometimes tell you when I’ve learned a word, made a friend, discovered some small park where old men debate the headlines, heard some good music
—its like jazz, which, even at its most abstract has the blues in it, has that long saudade like a memory of what didn’t happen someplace that might be
inlaid with mosaics of recollection which, in fact’s a street corner of the utmost ordinariness, though the late light steeps it in such nostalgia
I can hear a saxophone in the background wail an elegy for the revolution as someone dimi
nishes in the distance and the film’s over.
Now you know there won’t be another love scene.
Do those shadows presage undreamt-of war years? Twenty, thirty pass, and there’s still a sound track behind the credits:
Cecil Taylors complex riffs on the keyboard which a prep-school blonde, seventeen, named Julie sneaked me into the Blue Note for, because she knew how to listen—
or it could be Janis packing the Fillmore West with heartbreak, when I knew that Td see her playing pool again at Gino and Carlos some weekday midnight.
This is not about you at all: you could be anybody who died too young, who went to live in Sao Paolo or back to Warsaw or just stopped calling.
(Why did Alice Coltrane stop cutting records?
—think of Pharaoh Sanders being your sideman!— Lapidary grief: was its consolation all stone, all silence?)
Now it’s morning, gray, and at last a storm came after midnight, breaking the week-long dog days. Though I woke at three with a splitting headache,
I lay and listened
to the rain, forgave myself some omissions as the rain forgave and erased some squalor It was still too early for trucks and hoses.
A thud of papers
dropped outside the news agents metal shutters. Am I glad we didn’t last out the winter?
You, the street I made believe that I lived on have a new address.
Who I miss: the girl of a long-gone season like my sturdy six-year-old in her OshKosh overalls, attaining the age of reason and senior Lego.
You’ve become—and I never would have wished it— something like a metaphor of the passage (time, a cobbled alley between two streets which diverge, a tune that
reemerges out of the permutations rung on it by saxophone, bass and piano, then takes one more plunge so its resolution’s all transformation).
Someone’s always walking away; the music changes key, the moving men pack the boxes.
There the river goes with its bundled cargo: unanswered letters.
Vendanges
for Genevieve Pastre
The spiral of a story in an ear:
September, two years after the armistice that ended the disastrous drole de guerre.
A veteran, convinced to reenlist,
(he’d have a good pension when he retired) your father, fifty, was a prisoner.
Morning: in the small vineyard that was his, three sisters and their mother, out with shears and a basket, cutting table grapes on the slope below the Causse. This year (you are the middle sister, seventeen ) you’d be going into hypokhagne at the Lycee Fenelon. A line of men came up the hill, intent as ants, in stained and dusty Wehrmacht uniforms.
They trudged up toward the Pas de L’Escalette.
You pictured that strait rocky pass, a site for maquisards in ambush? When you turned, you saw Francoises face was white as paste. Standing before your mother, gaunt, sunburned and muddy, was a German officer.
Fie wiped his palms, schoolboyish, on his pants and, in approximate, respectful French requested, not demanded, food from her (if his request could not be a command).
She cut a bunch of grapes with the knife-blade shears, both lustrous in the morning shade.
Fie took it, thanked her, backed off, and diminished to be reintegrated in the line as
it snaked up toward the Causse. Her trembling hand clutching the secateurs, dropped to her skirt. Half-moons under her armpits, and a stench of fear on the breeze. She held her shoulders braced.
“I thought of your father,” she half-explained and half-implored, looking down at the dirt.
At school, they had you tear out all of Heine’s poems from the text of German poetry.
He was a decadent; he was a Jew.
The teachers could not teach his work—but you could read the excised pages on your own.
At least you thought that was what they implied, and read the poems, and memorized a few and wrote an (unread) essay when you’d finished.
In forty-five, your father, fifty-five
came home. Most of the other prisoners died.
Frost-bitten, kidneys shot, he was alive.
You were an agregee, rebellious, grown; barely interrogated his silence.
When he learned about the deportees, betrayed, stripped of their rank as citizens as if humanity could be revoked, his story went into the family’s
armoire with patched sheets, has not been aired since. Years later, you became the one who spoke.
You are a writer in your seventies.
The spiral of a story in your ear for once is not a story of your own.
A friend, a translator of Japanese, showed you a just-published inedit by a late Nippon master, who was
your sister’s lover: that same dark-browed Franchise
who died of breast cancer at forty-three
after a decade in Kyoto. He
claimed she had been an “incident” naive
enough to wait for him, enough to grieve
when he married. She made his language hers.
And his story?
A German officer,
half-starved, enters a garden, where a French farm woman, all alone and almost young, is picking fruit. In his few words of her tongue he asks for sustenance. She cuts a bunch of grapes for him. He remembers her for years. He goes back after the war (unharmed, presumably denazified) to find her. She, of course, has disappeared.
You imagine the scene that this inferred: the way she would have told it, with an ocean between her and her sisters and her mother in a noncognate language she had mastered: fear breaching the brief maternal garden, the writers mind already moving past her, filing her story, their intimacy erased in the retelling, as the three sisters are gone. An emblematic woman (but with the largesse of her devotion for the now doubly absent prisoner, and her fear, too, now given to the invader) remains, the icon that, somehow, he made her into, even if he made it for her.
You don’t have to imagine how she died.
You were with her. Your grief is mandatory and quotidian. But you would rather uncoil a spiral of the path that brought her back to the Causse. Dawn rain left the hillside scented with pine and sage. Wind in a hurry to move whispered the headlines in patois: transhumance, harvest, an absence of war as if it were itself an absent father.
A woman in an orchard with three daughters imagining a man somewhere who suffered, the dust-bloomed grapes that nonetheless she proffered to an intrusive and familiar other:
What can you do but tell someone the story?
ITINERANTS
Square du Temple
Artery of the workaday Marais,
the rue de Bretagne leads past the Square
du Temple. The sun burned off the clouds, the air
is brisk and chilly for the end of May.
Released, like springs, schools out, the children play on grass, in sand, on pavement, everywhere dashing and dodging, charging the atmosphere with light; like ancients, bidding the light to stay.
“My own breath”—in this book—“impelled me ‘write!’” A car backfires: massed pigeons take flight perch on the green-tiled dome of the bandshell, soar back, V-flocked, to the arboreal perimeter’s stained boughs and re-alight.
The book unwrites itself, whiter than night....
Quai de Valmy
The 3eme becomes the lOeme and 1 leme
on the other side of the Place de la Republique:
beyond that, the canal St. Martin, color of piss and phlegm,
is slow and local. The tow bridges squeak
back against the lock walls and let a low barge wallow
in and wait as the water floods down from the lock
until its level with the one that follows;
the stout lock keeper trudges importantly back a block
to his bridge, and the barge slides one square tub closer to
the tunnel under the Boulevard Jules Ferry.
I lean on the railing and wait for it to disappear since I don’t th
ink I have anything pressing to do as the clouds suddenly break and the sky comes clear with a January afternoon s brief clarity.
On the Stairway
My fourth-floor neighbor, Mme Uyttebroeck-
Achard, a widow in her seventies,
wears champagne-froth lace sheaths above her knees
and patent-leather boots, and henna-red-
orange curls down to the white laminated
collar of her raincoat, like a striptease
artiste who’s forgotten whom she needs to please.
She looks a lot like Violette Leduc.
On the dim stairway where she’s paused and set her shopping bags down, the aide-menagere for Mme Magin-Levacher, upstairs
one more flight, says Mme Uyttebroeck-Achard’s “pas nette”— not meaning “clean,” but, in her dealings, “clear”
—and I think of that muddy genius, Violette.
S3
Promeneurs
hommage aux deux Jacques R.
As I sat on the Quai de Jemmapes looking back at the Quai de Valmy with quadrilled cahier on my knee I could see a gray man in a cap with a similar book on his lap on the other side, opposite me.
Td been writing in mine—so had he. When I shut my notebook and got up (having screwed the black top on my Bic) he walked off at a comfortable clip, or he would have. But I was unique and the bench on the opposite quai remained empty. A crow flew away over the Hopital St Louis.
Rue des Ecouffes
The street is narrow, and it just extends
rue de Rivoli/rue des Rosiers
a street from which the children went away
clutching their mothers, looking for their friends—
on city buses used for other ends
one not-yet-humid morning in July.
Now kosher butchers coexist with gay
boutiques, not gaily. Smooth-cheeked ephebes hold hands.
Small boys with forelocks trail after bearded men—
and I have dragged that story in again
Desesperanto Page 2