Bickering all the way
but punctual at their labors
weekday and holiday
they are my long-term neighbors
with Mme de Sevigne
The days go on, routine.
I would be happy never to board another plane.
My feet, crossing the river, and the La Defense/Vincennes
line, or Balard-Creteil are forms of transportation quite adequate for me.
Other communication failed: well, let it be.
Sorrow becomes a sink and loss becomes a drain.
The drain begins to stink.
Call the plumber again.
Remember how to think.
The poet who wrote and longed
for a woman he barely knew
by whom he thought he’d been wronged
gave Paris new verses to
her electrical torch-song:
the weedy, lovelorn merman’s complaint to pitiless sirens, some similes, some sermons, Montmartre and environs —he even included Germans.
(I know the Rhone a bit;
I do not know the Rhine.
Proximity to it
gave ancestors of mine
the thought of a way out.)
When friends say what they mean companionship illumines nights that unroll, routine in being scaled for humans choosing their food and wine.
We ordered a house pichet and argued down to the wire at a smoke-stained brown cafe: my friend looked more like the pirate than the pirates fiancee.
Poached salmon followed soup while another loquacious friend talked such amazing shop we left the “Vagenende” when the waiters were cleaning up.
Days and nights, routine as unambiguous words: accompanied, alone, the hours are not like swords, strike gently, like the rain.
I have two pairs of glasses: for the peopled world beyond the panes; for the small world this is where I eat, and read Le Monde , and drink, and the evening passes.
I grill my trout. I drink
three glasses of Brouilly
or some adequate Southwest plonk.
A Mozart symphony
drowns out the screech and honk
of buses, bikes and vans and the selfsame garbage truck, manned by green-clad Africans come back at nine o’clock to empty the big green cans.
Paris, elegant gray godmother, consolation, heartbroken lullaby, smell of the metro station, you won’t abandon me.
A hot bath; Couperin: the hours are not like swords, strike gently, like the rain, notes on a harpsichord, impermanent, benign.
Migraine Sonnets
entre chien et loup
It’s a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen when all the thought in back of thought is loss.
How wide the dark rooms are you walk across with a glass of water and a migraine tablet. Sweat of hard dreams: unforgiven silences, missed opportunities.
The night progresses like chronic disease, symptom by symptom, sentences without pardon.
It’s only half past two, you realize.
Five windows are still lit across the street.
You wonder: did you tell as many lies as it now appears were told to you?
And if you told them, how did you not know they were lies? Did you know, and then forget?
There were lies. Did you know, and then forget
if there was a lie in the peach orchard? There was the lie
a saxophone riffed on a storm-thick summer sky,
there was the lie on a postcard, there was the lie thought
and suggested, there was the lie stretched taut
across the Atlantic, there was the lie that lay
slack in the blue lap of a September day,
there was the lie in bed, there was the lie that caught
its breath when it came, there was the lie that wept.
There was the lie that read the newspaper.
There was the lie that fell asleep, its clear face relaxing back to the face of a child.
There was the lie you held while you both slept.
A lie hung framed in the doorway, growing wild.
*3
The face framed in the doorframe is a wild card now, mouth could eat silence, mouth could speak the indigestible. Eyes, oh tourmaline, a crack in the glass, break the glass. Down a green-tiled corridor double doors open. Who was wheeled through, hallucinating on a gurney, weak with relief as muscle and nerve flickered awake, while a dreamed face framed in a doorframe opened and smiled?
Precisely no one’s home. No dog will come
to lay his jowls across bent knees and drool
and smile the black-gummed smile he shares with wolves.
The empty doorframe frames an empty room
whose dim fluorescence is perpetual.
The double doors close back upon themselves.
The double doors close back upon themselves The watcher from the woods rejoins the pack: shadows on branches’ steely lacework, black on black, dark ornaments, dark wooden shelves.
Fever-wolves, guardians a lamp dissolves in pitiless logic, as an insomniac waits to hear the long night crack and break into contaminated rusty halves.
This is the ninety-seventh (count) night watch in the underbrush of hours closed on you since a lie split open like a rotten fruit.
A metal band around your head begins
to tighten; pain shutters your eyes like too much light.
It’s a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen.
Max
Last year I lost a proper name, the name I answered to, which was my grandfather’s and now am nameless, even in the bad dream
where someone else has all the right answers and I am wrong and wrong and nothing that’s true was true and every last word’s hers:
bad dreams like costive shit from sluggish guts, the residue of loss. More things I lost: savoy sausages with hazelnuts;
a brindled pit bull bounding for a tossed ball in the dog run; Korean groceries’ lilacs in buckets under car exhaust
on Broadway, a blossoming line of cherry trees, a key in a lock, a twilight saxophone positing lyrical philosophies
of meditation, of revolution;
the right of way on a square mile of streets
someone might do their shopping on with someone;
desire not dried and shriveled by regrets;
the place that I came back to when I came;
the torch singer’s trite rhyme of “lust” and “trust”;
the beloved child’s freedom, that freedom to spiral farther and farther out from home since each trajectory loops back toward home
where someone calls her by her proper name.
$5
Road Work
The third week of July shutters creep closed on the day, inevitably, slowly.
The citizens go away to the mountains, to the sea,
to residences secondaires or relatives on the farm, on charters, on guided tours.
(In Belleville, people stay home, and in the Goutte d’Or
where “charter” is shorthand for forced expatriation.
Uneasy immigrants cannot afford vacations from an unpromised land
which might not take them back from wars and epidemics.
Their children play in the park with summer academics’ kids from Berlin and New York.)
Geraniums and fuchsias stand in the morning sun Lavender, mauve, their luscious blooms are dared, then done, wilt like unuttered wishes.
Once I got off a train and took the metro to
my stop, Breguet-Sabin,
and a wave of joy washed through
me, climbing up into the rain
and crossing the rue Amelot.
I said its name out loud like a good friend’s name, although it’s a street where nothing occurred that touched anyone I know.
Sorrow persists, an itch, a sore that doesn’t heal.
Festering under a patch of bandage, edges congeal, could break: try not to scratch.
Mme Lev
acher upstairs lives alone with a TV.
Besides her aide-menagere’s afternoon visits three times weekly, no one’s there
although she has a son who lives five minutes away (a robust sixty-one) above the fromagerie in the rue Saint-Antoine.
The housekeeper is from Mauritius. We stop and talk. I say, I’d come and visit; I could shop....
We’re standing in the dim
light on the spiral stairway, which I can still run up like the young housekeeper.
My room is not a trap.
In its bright book-lined shelter
a dialoguing presence silenced itself abruptly.
Now absence is the essence of cycles which unsubtly suggest the hardest lessons
were not learned very well. Road work: a jackhammer tears up the street: the smell of steaming bacs of tar invests the cafe, full
of tourists and a few neighborhood regulars.
I am both “I” and “thou,” watching the bulldozers,
I talk about them to
myself, as I’ve always done, my own interlocutor.
What’s already begun, a season of departure, will terminate with mine.
I’ll probably come back less occupied with grief.
Slowly around the block in a vest like a maple leaf, with a tall, carved walking stick
comes a cavalier old man with his wolfish alter ego.
One sits, and one lies down; one gets water; one, espresso.
One smokes, one sleeps in the sun.
Grief’s radical subtraction enacted, may there be some countersurge, reaction of self-sufficient joy at a rainy intersection.
Paragraph for Hayden
Quadruple bypass: yes, he had it.
What happens next is anybody’s guess.
After the surgeon’s pre-op visit
he pulled the tubes and needles out, got dressed
and stalked outside to smoke a cigarette.
The surgeon threatened not to operate.
Old heart, old curmudgeon,
old genius, terrified old man
who more than anyone knows form
is one rampart of sanity,
your mind is ringing like a fire alarm
and you still smoke three packs a day.
Not lover, barely friend, from this distance I break your rule and say,
stay in the present tense. Stay in the present tense.
February 10
Inarticulate, the dream subsides in growls. Nothing as human as clean sentences.
Nothing as cleansing as repentance. Was some life left folded into plush blue towels and 200-plus thread all-cotton sheets like a housewifely sachet of lavender?
I’ve learned the answer or I haven’t, or the question balances, repeats, repeats day after night into the cotton’s cool and solitary folds, the resurrected light I look into with unprotected eyes. Sometimes the sky is beautiful.
Sometimes despair is as habitual as walking in the morning to the train station to be in class on time, as plain yogurt, as grapefruit juice, steady and dull as the seventeenth hour of a migraine all evening long, still with me when I wake.
And don’t I often trigger a headache refilling glass on solo glass of wine?
Isn’t there something clearer about pain than year-old grief gone tarnished with its dull blade, with its blotched skin, with its bad smell? The dusk recedes again, or afternoon extends itself, life measured against light: how new, how much repeated, for how long, whether, and how profoundly, I was wrong, whether, in what ignorance, I was right.
Ranns
When will some tutelary image come spinning in brief silhouette past the window, blown brown leaf
that’s not grief,
vagrant, ragged, cold and stiff?
All the noises of work day commerce, cars, children’s voices
filter up
from the street, crescendo, drop to an undertone. Now it’s mid-afternoon. Couperin
harpsichord’s
song-settings (I know the words): oh, nameless, impossibly fair and fickle shepherdess—
who was not
any such thing, but some witty courtesan, who gossiped with Mme de Montespan.
My good friend
knows the passages, could find, as the measures rise and fall, a balance that she treasures.
Knowing more
of grief than she bargained for; she’d say again: make black tea, run a hot bath, read Montaigne.
Almost Equinoctial
The banks of the river are covered in water. It’s rained that much: plane trees up to their waists, the stairs going down from the quais step onto water, not footpaths. It’s rained through March, daily, on crocus and jonquil, on outthrust brown
red-tipped branches, on market-stall awnings. Its rained on the barges, stopped boat traffic, houseboats are tethered at sea.
The path that leads to the Jardin des Plantes down the Quai Saint-Bernard, past willows and post-cubist bronzes, is drowned
for a day, a week. The riverbank amphitheaters are under mud-colored water, no dog-romps, no kids playing drums with their Arab or Gallic or Jewish hair twisted in dreads.
The benches are stranded on landspits or islanded. Where do the pensioners sit, has some cafe absorbed the clochards? Will the moon pull the tidewash to sea tonight, will the sun uncrumple the grass, bake the mud back to footworthy clay? The Saturday strollers dig their Vibram soles in single file on the seeping green hummock that clutches the unlikely edge of the swollen Seine. Holding a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of orange and white multi-petalled ranunculi I muddy my good black loafers, too. There’s no cause for alarm yet, no new one, only a usual passage turned strange in the middle of March on a day when it hasn’t rained yet, that’s no longer a relevant anniversary, on my way to lunch in the south end of the cinquieme.
Sonnet on a Line from Venus Khoury-Ghata
She recognized the seasons by their texture like flannel sheets or thick-piled bath-sized towels like white asparagus or colored vowels whose scabby bark elicited conjecture.
She recognized the seasons by their light as flowering plants and bushes, keyed to measure its length, wake briefly or unroll at leisure beneath it: even when it’s cold, the night holds off; the long and reminiscent dusk is like a pardon or a friend returned whom she thought elsewhere, subtracted forever, eclipsed in distance. Though the plants can t bask in heat, darkness delays, and they discern what equilibrium they can recover.
Quoi de neuf sur la guerre?
(Cafe Le Diplomate, Turenne/Saint Claude, March, 2001)
Five old men
dissect last week’s election.
Jacques’ student granddaughter bought a studio apartment
—bigger than
the three rooms that he lived in with his two brothers, parents, in the rue du Pont-aux-Choux ...
(two streets up).
Glasses folded on his cap,
Maurice fishes for a not-quite-lost riposte in Yiddish.
(His accent is a familiar garment on a neighbor, here or in Strauss Park on upper Broadway.)
The senior
four worked here before the war.
Now they’re back in the rag trade.
An eleven o’clock break
—tradition:
black coffee and discussion, the cheder relived later.
The one two decades younger,
Victor, will at last bring up Israel —sixtyish son asking his elders what ought to be done.
And Maurice,
the pouches around his eyes creased deep in a sad smile, says, having known wars, not much peace,
(a schoolboy in Krakow in 1930),
“A solution? There is just one. The final solution.”
Does he mean the British had a plan in ’48: Arabs could finish Hitler’s job in the new state?
Does he mean
genocide in Palestine
to be practiced by a our own”?
Victor changes the subject.
The
waitress interrupts exegesis:
Please pay, her shift is over.
The watchdog of the cafe,
a boxer,
trails his young boss, stops at her trim heels. He scowls, sniffs the floor and gets sawdust on his jowls.
Ghazal
She took what wasn’t hers to take: desire
for all that’s not her, for what might awake desire.
With it, the day’s a quest, a question, answered where -ever eye, mind lights. Desire seeks, but one can’t seek desire.
A frayed wire, a proof, a flame, a drop of globed hot wax, a riddle solved or not by William Blake: desire.
Erase the film with light, delete the files, re-reel the story, will all that unmake desire?
For peace or cash, lovers and whores feign lust or climaxes.
A solitary can evoke, but cannot fake desire.
Crave nothing, accept the morning’s washed and proffered air brushing blued eyelids with an oblique desire.
There was an other, an answer, there was a Thou or there were mutilations suffered for your sake, desire.
Without you, there is no poet, only some nameless hack lacking a voice without your voice to speak desire.
For the 6th of April
for Marie Ponsot Eden is
pots and tubs on the terrace.
Tenacious seeds root, wind-strewn, to bloom around the ficus.
Light and shade from this and every decade cross and dapple the notebook you hold open on your lap.
Eighty? Well,
forty, too, and twenty: still no ones fool, a canny heart, spirit joyously at school.
Precocious
child, you run ahead of us aging enfants terribles of a later generation
Slim mother
of a brood of boys, you were (seemed) all honed will, clear mind, like a boy, hermit, young sybil
while the day-to-day life of the body which needs food on the table, an orderly neighborhood
and wages,
worked through you. You filled pages nonetheless: fables, lines, rhymes, hints from all your languages:
how to live
well on bread and wine, forgive old enemies and lovers so that full days pass in peace.
Is it luck
Desesperanto Page 4