and will inevitably next compare
the curtains of the creaky balcony
smelling of female exile, exhaled prayer
with the discreet shutters of the womens bar.
Les Scandaleuses
for M.G.H.
Hung on the exposed brown stone of the bar’s back wall, words and collage on aquarelle metaphor a landscape or a well-traveled sky, thigh, eye with a view of stars: her latest work. A child between two wars, she learned her own vision from the salty squall of Norman winters, learned what she couldn’t tell except with brush, chalk, pencil, engraver’s stylus and blade, with ink spilled on a stone as the sea spills up and over the stones when the tide comes in. Leather jacket, cap, she stands, briefly alone at the bar with a glass of wine, her Celtic moonstone eyes as light and dark as the shapes she made while the night’s first women come in out of the rain.
Les Scandaleuses II
The nights first women come in out of the rain:
two couples who arrived, enlaced, astride
two motorcycles, pulled up just outside
the door, doff helmets and leather, order gin/
tonic, beer, beer, a kir. From the bar, they crane
their necks toward the row of dreams, mindscapes, implied
back roads they’re too young to have traveled; slide
closer together, wanting things to begin.
Watching, she doesn’t envy them their youth, their way of being in a pack, in pairs (wounds inflicted, in the name of “truth,” on friends, near-infidelities on stairs).
But the lacework beginning near that one’s mouth is elegant. Engraver’s grooves. Soft dares.
Nulle part
The elegant engraver’s grooves: soft dares
to follow down to the glass-roofed quai, embark
on the last train’s last car hurtling through the dark
tunnel irregularly blazed with flares
alizarin, viridian. Lit by the glare’s
a silhouette, androgynous, at work
setting (in Paris? London? Prague? New York?)
mosaic tiles. She leads you up spiral stairs
into the blue explosion of the air’s
matinal brilliance. But she disappears—
avid flesh, mercurial avatar
desire or imagination sends?
And then you know exactly where you are: the street is narrow; you see where it ends.
Square du Temple II
Moon on late daylight: green fruit plucked from a stalk.
Almost July; almost the end of cherry
season. I walked out on a literary
cocktail early, because I couldn’t make more small talk
and because it’s a pervasive joy to walk
across the square at not-yet-dusk. Its tutelary
geniuses, preadolescent, very
slender and supple African children, hawk-
swoop on skates around the resting lawn.
(The toddlers and their guardians have gone home.) A breeze flies from their shoulder blades, loquacious and invisible, in banners.
The duck pond is refreshed by small cascades, as silence cures an overdose of manners.
Rue Beaurepaire
On a wide side street that leads to the canal
job-seeking Meridional families,
retired mail clerks, philoprogenitive Chinese
textile workers, Tunisian grocers
have found an issue everyone agrees
to disagree on—IV drug users’
right to a safe haven among neighbors:
a hostel instead of a hospital
ER, with coffee, washing machines and showers,
a Moroccan intern who serves as nurse,
weekly rap groups, small tables to converse
across. From balconies, spanning the street,
hang homemade banners, spray paint on white sheets:
send them to another street—not ours.
Reve champetre
If, in the Cite Dupetit-Thouars there were a three-roomed flat for sale, I would leave my tourist-infested neighborhood for semi-rural quiet off the Square du Temple. You can only drive a car in if you live there. Next to a dusty woodworker’s shop’s an ancient saddlery.
Behind a shop front, two gray women were turning clay on wheels that softly whined.
Stiff blue hydrangeas stood importantly on guard on windowsills; on a clothesline two work shirts flapped above a cobbled yard. (It’s not five minutes from the Cyber Bar, and, in the rue du Temple, Monoprix.)
Rue Beaurepaire II
The banners across the rue Beaurepaire
are gone, those “for” and also those “against”
the shop-front drop-in center. Someone’s rinsed
away the angry slogans spray-painted
across the elegant discreet facade
stenciled with quotations from Voltaire,
Sartre, Aragon, Camus. The mayor stayed out of it: nobody was convinced and rumor once more outweighed evidence.
(The schools one street over—really, next door!
Don’t they have AIDS? Dealers will come. They’ll steal...) They won’t be driven into the canal; just relocated to the Gare du Nord a site indicative of transience—
—according to the ACT UP bulletin.
But on a brilliant summer afternoon below the white, newly anonymous facade, the door was open nonetheless.
In the doorway, two women and a man were talking. One woman, I guessed, might be a client, so I went on past and sat by the canal, which, in the sun, looked less like bodily effluvium; a few discreet minutes later, returned.
The young man, dressed in orange, fresh on brown/ olive skin, was the intern who’d been there last June. They’re backed now by la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme; keep clinic hours, but quietly. They’ve learned.
Rue de Bretagne
after Jacques Roubaud
That afternoon in the rue de Bretagne (I think back often to that afternoon )
I pushed a shopping cart through Monoprix where anything you’d like to eat or own— Roquefort or bath FA, shrink-wrapped lots of three bottles of Badoit, pate de campagne, a coffeemaker engineered by Braun, is there to contemplate, covet and buy.
Fulfillment in a supermarket’s fast: would that it were desire’s paradigm,
I thought, in line, sure that a stretch of time could, like the summer’s evening sunlight, last on an uncomplicated day in June remembering those lines of Aragon.
26 rue de Turenne/ 26 December
Across the street, the widow weighs the storm that woke her in predawn dark when the wind rattled her tall old windows. Lights blink on in other buildings: flares. A car alarm enters the howling, full of screech and thud: clay on macadam, glass on metal, wood on plastic. A cafe awning rips, flaps.
A green trash can skids down the street. She wraps a moth-eaten blue shawl that she peels from an armchair around her, covering her head.
It seems as if she’s always lived alone.
It’s ten years, or two months, that he’s been dead. Her grandmother’s chandelier tinkles behind her, seasick, swaying like a pendulum.
Turenne/ Francs-Bourgeois
A winter Tuesday morning: people shopped
with damp dogs bundling under their purchases
in light rain, fine as an unspoken wish
while merchants scoured and scrubbed their premises.
From behind the jazz-club’s curtained door
held open with a bucket and a mop,
a Yorkshire terrier surged out and frisked
and yipped around the tweedy-elegant
heels of a couple with a Lab, that risked
a curious butt-sniff, also punishment.
The thin-lipped woman whipped the Labrador across the nose, but only with the leash.
The dog whimpered and cringed. A passer-by across the street from them began to cry.
Troisieme sans ascenseur
A square of sunlight
on the study wall is worth her notice, so she makes a note. Various printings of the books she wrote fill shelves encroaching on the narrow hall but not her work-room: that’s spare, practical. Six dictionaries, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , typewriter. Seventy-eight, she’s a technician of grammatical rules in three languages, and that will do.
The desk is a librarian’s, blonde oak.
The angle of her chair, turned toward a stack of fine-lined blank notebooks, leads her eyes to the bare wall blazing with its pristine one tall north window, framing the winter sun.
Librairie L’Arbre a lettres
The February noon was more like March.
A wind that smelled marine pushed a soak-through rain in from nowhere, veiling a gaze as blue as hydrangeas around a fieldstone church which I was content to notice more than watch while browsing in Biography and New Releases in the bookshop on the boulevard du Temple: an aleatoric search for a novel cited in Le Monde.
Books are clannish; I wasn’t sansfamille
opening that one. The rain thinned; the rain stopped.
An afternoon proposed itself to me.
My serviceable brown umbrella dripped dry, as the sky cleared, in the umbrella stand.
Troisieme sans ascenseur ailleurs
The cold rain falls and fell all afternoon
the way it fell through the last months of winter.
In twos and threes, my friends are out of town for Easter weekend. Tourists take the center over, gloved and scarved—speaking Italian and Portuguese: they’ve holidays as well.
How stubbornly the fuchsia rhododendron in the square blooms in unseasonable cold, how stubbornly the squadron of swallows swoops between volleys of rainfall.
But I’m imagining their flight—I think them flying, from a hard-backed chair behind pine table, windows, Bach, books, gone to ground. The late gray sky darkens. I want a drink.
Square du Temple: Another August
Two long-legged black girls jump double-Dutch in turn on a stretch-band looped over the fence around the lawn. A high-cheekboned intense and Slavic-looking pregnant woman touches the white bandanna on her hair, her much-dog-eared Pascal closed on her lap. Her pants’ black satin sets off the magnificence of her high-tech running shoes. We watch three Chinese toddler boys circle and circle the bandshell, holding hands, singing Marlbrough s’en va-t’en guerre. A stout young African-print clad brown mother kicks a soccer ball to her small boy and girl who kick it back.
When will the moment be enough again?
Place des Vosges: October
There is memory, and there’s the haze
of misted afternoon becoming memory
if you’re lucky, on a damp October day
you wish were just one of a string of October days
in the same city, at the same address:
small spark no one is likely to take away
of appetite for a conversation, curiosity
about the nights and thoughts that bronzed a face.
In the square, beneath unleafing horse-chestnut trees autumnal as yourselves, but acquiescent, you trash a notable lapsed Communist.
Your friend says, “Turncoats sell their ass to the flies and then complain that history is unjust.”
For a breath of paradox, you are in the present.
DESESPERANTO
Grief
Grief walks miles beside the polluted river, grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice, grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices as flung despisals.
It will always be the first of September.
There will be Dominican boys whose soccer game provides an innocent conversation for the two people
drinking coffee, coatless. There will be sunset roselight on the river like a cathedral.
There will be a rusty, amusing tugboat pushing a barge home.
Did she think she knew what her friend intended?
Did she think her brother rejoiced to see her?
Did she think she’d sleep one more time till sunrise holding her lover?
Grief has got no brother, sister or lover.
Grief finds friendship elsewhere. Grief, in the darkened hours and hours before light flicks in one window holds grief, a mirror.
Brother? He was dead, in a war-drained city.
Grief was shelling peas, with cold water running in the sink; a harpsichord trilled Corelli until the phone rang.
And when grief came home from a post-op nightwatch two small girls looked reticent over homework.
Half the closet, half the drawers were empty.
Who was gone this time?
Grief is isolationist, short-viewed. Grief lacks empathy, compassion, imagination; reads accounts of massacres, floods and earthquakes mired in one story.
Grief is individual, bourgeois, common and banal, two womens exchange in Sunday market: “Le mari de Germaine est mort.” They fill bags with apples.
Grief is primagravida, in her fifth month.
Now she knows the fetus has died inside her.
Now she crosses shopping-streets on a sun-shot mid-winter morning.
Winter licks the marrow from streets that open onto parks and boulevards, rivers, river-parallel parkways, arteries to bridges, interstates, airports.
Grief daubs kohl on middle-aged burning eyelids.
Grief drives miles not noticing if the highway runs beside an ocean, abandoned buildings or blackened wheatfields
—and, in fact, she’s indoors. Although her height is average, massive furniture blocks and crowds her: oak and pine, warm gold in their grain she thought would ransom her season.
Workmen clear a path to repair the windows, not with panes of light on their backs, no message-
bearers these. Still stubbornly green, a street leads back to the river.
Fourteen years drained into the fifteen minutes that it took a late-summer sun to douse its light behind the opposite bank, the boys to call their match over.
Chanson de la mal aimee
December fog condensed above the Seine.
Though it was not the season to atone for sins, for my sins (unknown) the tears began again. Unknown, as another minds unknown till written, shouted, sung, spray-painted: spoken. Perhaps (why we all cry) unknown even then.
I walked toward my own bed that I slept and woke in across that river, or another one.
Between harp-cables humming toward Brooklyn we were, we thought, descendants of Hart Crane, emancipated, nocturnal, nineteen.
The city’s nightwatch glistened on either side. Streetlights were haloed by the damp and dawn. Shadows beneath implied what they implied.
Once we arrived, we’d just turn back again across that river, or another one.
I crossed the Thames in taxis for a man who lived quite well without me in South London. Later there was a girl who heard a train head north, beneath red leaves, along the Hudson. The Joyce Bridge on the Liffey one damp June morning stretched forward like a conversation I’d no reason to think would not go on across that river, or another one.
A fresh breeze from the arm of the Malvan fingered across the terrace of the stone house where a card table sat in the sun at which I wrote, bare-chested, dripping sweat.
A Gauloise smouldered out in the Cinzan-
0 ashtray. Soft hiss, like the cigarette:
a bird rushed up through oak leaves and was gone across that river or another one.
The Seine descends from sources in the Yonne;
The children of Vincelles and Vincelottes launched lanterns cradling candles, let them float downriver, to begin the village fete.
There would be fireworks, in the misty rain.
A couple on the terrace of the inn mourned someone as the fireflies blinked out across that river, or another one.
The Hudson saw my heart break. The Hudson took it, discarded garbage on its swells.
Tm leaving you. There is nobody else.
She lied she lied she lied she lied she lied.
Walk away from the river,
shaking, stunned as you once came back to it, glad bride, found child, proud friend. Sewage seeped and spread across that river, or another one.
There is no heaven and it has no Queen (There is no God and Mary is His Mother).
1 have one life and one is all I get;
it will be “same” unless I make it “other.”
The workings of the wind, so intricate, augmented to a night of devastation.
Water bloated the banks, with bridges down across that river or another one.
Betrayal isn’t torture, cancer, rape.
Authorities don’t gas abandoned wives;
deplore the ones who put their heads in stoves (still, don’t suggest it to the Taliban).
Betrayal is a dull stereotype.
“The friends who met here and embraced are gone / each to his own mistake ...” (that’s wartime Auden) across that river or another one
I crossed the Pont Sully, above the Seine, below a small, bright, distant winter moon tasting the conversation and the room, glad that my lungs were clear again, and wine had flavor, that I wanted to walk home at midnight, that walking home alone at midnight was a privilege of mine across that river or another one.
Explication de texte
Plusieurs reponses sontpossibles, mais montrez comment la ville peutse lire comme un substitut de Yobjet desire. —Text on Apollinaire for lyceens preparing the baccalaureat
Paris nights, drunk on gin, aflame with electrical fire.
Trolleys with green-lit spines sing their long route down wire and rail, deranged machines.
—Guillaume Apollinaire; trans. M.H.
Paris is wintery gray.
The small rain spits and sputters. Before the break of day when green trucks hose the gutters lights go on in the bakery.
The days go on, routine light lingers on the clocks Yellow and red and green crowd in the window box impermanent and benign.
The tiny sans-abri and her more substantial friend arrive from a night on the quay at their avenue, extend their hands to earn their pay,
each on her opposite side.
They’ve been on the street together for over a decade while others jettisoned other partners and promises made.
Desesperanto Page 3