no one gets her old life back?
What you regret you redress if you can; use; don’t forget.
Your daughter, one more city gardener, tends your best cuttings in pots in pale sun a half-block west.
Your desk looks
out on your trees (past the books).
Thick thumbs of amaryllis
work their way up and spring comes.
wo
A Sunday After Easter
Ah! que le monde est grand a la clarte des lampes! Auxyeux du souvenir, que le monde est petit.
—Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
A child who thought departure would be sweet,
I roam the borders of my neighborhood, dominical, diminished. Young gay men, their elbows brushing, Sunday-stroll, in pairs headed for the weekend flea market on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir at Oberkampf. I sit in a cafe nursing a decaf. A small Chinese boy (or girl) in sweats stands on tiptoes to reach the flippers of the Space Pirates machine.
I want to find some left turn into dream
or story, the next chapter, memory
not saturated with regret, into
a vision as unlikely as the mare
with sweat-soaked roan flanks and a tangled mane,
dragon’s breath steaming from her flared nostrils
onto a wind too sharp to call a breeze
cantering riderless across the square
opposite, between the children in
the sandbox and the old men arguing
on benches, in French, in Mandarin,
in Arabic, Yiddish and Portuguese,
despite the afternoons dour, bone-deep chill,
early February in late April,
except for punctual persistent green
(Fringy and still-fragile auburn fronds burst from the rhododendron s rubbery green leaves, red swellings globe the tips of cherry boughs, japonica blooms in double yellow stars on bamboo stalks.
The orange crocuses are past their prime on the lawn, but now the purple ones emerge, and pansies, with mascaraed petals in their beds are gold and purple too.
Three early roses, peach-dappled white, stand out on bushes nearly bare, studded with sparse, furled, also reddish nascent leaves.)
of trees and shrubs.
An afternoon when sun is as unlikely as a riderless horse to cross the square.
Imagine that
it were given back to me to be
the child who knew departure would be sweet,
the boy who drew square-rigged ships, the girl who knew
truck routes from Ottawa to Mexico,
the one who found a door in Latin verse
and made a map out of hexameters.
A young Moroccan or Tunisian with a thick, kinky auburn pony tail, vastly pregnant, in an oversized sweater and cargo pants, a toddler and an almond-eyed five-year-old in tow, sits with an older blonde in camels hair coat and tailleur, who orders a Sancerre (the name of the cafe is a Le Sancerre”).
The young mother gets three Oranginas but the Chinese child and her older son have found each other (school friends) and begun to play a giggling round of hide-and-seek, under the two empty tables between us.
The little one, whose name is Dominique, slurps Orangina through a straw, and sways to the loudspeaker’s Motown Muzak ( O bars of my girlhood. O saisons, 6 chateaux), then slaps his snowpants and begins to howl “Je veux ma doudoune! Je veux ma cagoule!”
(a child already eager to depart).
“On dit” she tells him gently, “je voudrais”
She reaches in her pants pocket to pay
but the tall blonde has (she’s whom to the young mother?).
Bise-bise, the ritual, they leave each other
at the door; the girl, in a long dark-
blue greatcoat crosses the street to the park,
a child tugging each hand; the woman turns
the corner into the rue des Archives,
becomes a shape the falling light discerns.
(One would postulate brown, not nascent leaves,
the color of absinthe, but innocent,
the color of a world renewed, present,
where absence has become a habit and
occasionally less significant
than wind turning a corner, than the frond
from which a bloom breaks, than the old storm-bent
willow skimming the rain-swollen pond.)
The Chinese child is crying silently
but finds the seated couple he or she
belongs to (both are French, white, not-quite-young).
The tear-tracked child and father reinstall
themselves at Space Pirates pinball.
The roan mare pauses, thrusts her head among the rhododendron bushes, nibbles the tender shoots, unseen beast nourished on unlikely fruits, turning her copper head in fits and starts.
And what is riderless in me departs around the corner, into the next street, into the afternoon, holding its light later in each days cloud-leaded sky.
Or stays, doglike, between the wrought-iron feet of the small table, ears at the alert, actively silent, having learned to wait.
Fable
for M.P.
A fox, a badger, any provident creature
clever and agile, knowing how to get through a long
winter and a wet spring, you tapped your foot to the song
Louis Armstrong sang, retrieved on the loudspeaker,
and read the TLS, and sipped a strong
mug of French Roast, while outside the cafe
a fine cold rain inundated upper Broadway
across which your friend ran back and forth, being
vague and distracted and distraught and wrong
about how long precisely it would take
to triage, dismantle, wrap, pack, box and stack
a third of a life in one rain-curtained building:
a wild duck s molting wings flapped in distress
between departure and the TLS.
Jean-Michel Galibert,
Epicier a Saint-Jean-de-Fos
for Guy Goffette
Reconstitute a sense to make of absence in the still heat of noon, south, summer where spindled years unravel and unwind.
A hound bays behind a fence. An old white van
beached beneath oleander in a yard
rusts where it ran down, where something came to grief.
Some summers, joy illuminated grief
and solitude was savory. Then, absence
was a prelude, then stiff, starched, flag-striped yards
of sheet on a clothesline flapped in a sudden summer
gust, like the curtains on a caravan
parked in the town square, billowing with wind,
while children anticipated drumrolls, wind instruments, brasses, florid joy and grief mimed close to home. From the striped awning of a van whiffs of merguez fried with onions, smell whose absence would be a small, real rift in the stuff of summer.
Would have been. The dog paces in his three square yards
of territory, the paved part of a yard
where jasmine and oleander wind
their ribboned leaves like schoolgirls starting summer
vacation. Decline “departure,” decline “grief,”
compose an essay illustrating absence
using, for instance, the abandoned van
that used to be, let’s say, the grocer’s van which parked on Wednesdays opposite the schoolyard and the children who were present, who were absent. Women came up in print dresses, cardigans, wind-breakers, seasons changing, even grief fading like the painted sign in summer
sun, winter rain. After a few winters, springs, summers the bright sign was illegible, the van rusted, someone had grown into grief.
The van is parked in the grocer’s son’s back yard, its windows shattered, spiderwebbed. The wind blows through it, marks itself present in that absence.
The grocer’s son sat in the van each summer morning that f
irst year. Even grief was absent as the wind unwound the streamers in his yard.
Again, for Hayden
I.
This morning
at five fear seized me and clung like a leech, a tick, napalm: what could calm its ravening?
Flicked on the switch of a round pine bed-lamp which was wedged among books piled there: Montaigne, Flaubert, Gallant, Rich
and Carruth.
Either a book or a bath
will do when the hours a drop
down the slope: loss, age, pain, death.
(A pilot
trapped in the gyring cockpit or just the old soul upstairs, ninety years old, losing it.)
Tve my own
words, but I read yours: snow, stone, logs, stars, to push back despair.
I read bear. I read mountain.
I read thaw
when there’s rarely enough snow
in this city to warrant
that event—but fear’s soft paw
might lift, might
follow the lingering night
off in silence, while named birds
cry their own words and take flight.
II.
I hear the gears of your own old engine, revving up, growl: this is too damn vague. Developers blasted your numinous green mountain in the seventies: highways, logjams. And on the rue Saint-Antoine,
M. Latronche, the best traiteur has gone (retired): no more aubergine flans, wild-boar ham off the bone.
There’s another fast-food, panini-to-go and Coke, for the tourists.
You walked across your aster-constellated meadow what may now have been twenty Augusts ago, counting the losses, noticing rust, coral, crimson, what changes, what lasts, what sharpened fear and sorrow into song.
Desesperanto
after Joseph Roth
Parce que c’etait lui; parce que c’etait moi. —Montaigne, “De L’Amitie”
The dream’s forfeit was a night in jail and now the slant light is crepuscular.
Papers or not, you are a foreigner whose name is always difficult to spell.
You pack your one valise. You ring the bell.
Might it not be prudent to disappear beneath that mauve-blue sky above the square fronting your cosmopolitan hotel?
You know two shortcuts to the train station which could get you there, on foot, in time.
The person who’s apprised of your intention and seems to be your traveling companion is merely the detritus of a dream.
You cross the lobby and go out alone.
You crossed the lobby and went out alone through the square, where two red-headed girls played hopscotch on a chalk grid, now in the shade, of a broad-leafed plane tree, now in the sun.
The lively, lovely, widowed afternoon disarmed, uncoupled, shuffled and disarrayed itself; despite itself, dismayed you with your certainties, your visa, gone from your breast-pocket, or perhaps expired.
At the reception desk, no one inquired if you’d be returning. Now you wonder why.
When the stout conductor comes down the aisle,
mustached, red-faced, at first jovial,
and asks for your passport, what will you say?
When they ask for your passport, will you say that town’s name they’d find unpronounceable which resonates, when uttered, like a bell in your mind’s tower, as it did the day you carried your green schoolbag down the gray fog-cobbled street, past church, bakery, shul, past farm women setting up market stalls it was so early. “I am on my way
to school in You were part of the town
now, not the furnished rooms you shared with Mutti, since the others disappeared.
Your knees were red with cold; your itchy wool socks had inched down, so you stooped to pull them up, a student and a citizen.
You are a student and a citizen of whatever state is transient.
You are no more or less the resident of a hotel than you were of that town whose borders were disputed and redrawn.
A prince conceded to a president.
Another language became relevant
to merchants on that street a child walked down
whom you remember, in the corridors
of cities you inhabit, polyglot
as the distinguished scholar you were not
to be. A slight accent sets you apart,
but it would mark you on that peddlers’-cart
street now. Which language, after all, is yours?
Which language, after all these streets, is yours, and why are you here, waiting for a train?
You could have run a hot bath, read Montaigne. But would footsteps beyond the bathroom doors bolt have disturbed the nondescript interior’s familiarity, shadowed the plain blue draperies? You reflect, you know no one who would, of you, echo your author’s Because it was he; because it was I , as a unique friendship’s non sequitur.
No footsteps and no friend: that makes you free. The train approaches, wreathed in smoke like fur around the shoulders of a dowager with no time for sentimentality.
With no time for sentimentality, mulling a twice-postponed book review, you take an empty seat. Opposite you a voluble immigrant family is already unwrapping garlicky sausages—an unshaven man and his two red-eared sons.
You once wrote: it is true, awful, and unimportant, finally, that if the opportunity occurs some of the exiles become storm-troopers; and you try, culpably, to project these three into some torch-lit future, filtering out their wrangling (one of your languages) about the next canto in their short odyssey.
The next canto in your short odyssey will open, you know this, in yet another hotel room. They have become your mother country: benevolent anonymity of rough starched sheets, dim lamp, rickety escritoire, one window. Your neighbors gather up their crusts and rinds. Out of a leather satchel, the man takes their frayed identity cards, examines them. The sons watch, pale and less talkative. A border, passport control, draw near: rubber stamp or interrogation? You hope the customs officer lunched well; reflect on the recurrent implication of the dream s forfeit. One night in jail?
Canzone
Late afternoon, a work-table four stories above the rain-slick January street —and words begin to slide into a story someone told once. Repeating well-known stories with new inflections, does the teller add a nuance or a chapter to the story— the teller’s own, or a recounted story— so that it takes an unexpected turn and doesn’t, like a child from school, return at the same time, to the same place? History cycles over in place, unless we learn something from the cycle—learn to unlearn
what’s overdetermined. The child learns how to learn
from listening to, embroidering on stories
repeated to delight, to soothe. She learns
from delight, from repetition, learns
syntactic play, learns courtesies the street
exacts (accepts, rewards when they’re well learned),
learns over time how much there’s still to learn.
At eight, eighteen, you promise that you’ll add a word to your lexicon each day, add a book to your bedside reading, start to learn a language. Now, like a trip, you plan returning to a book read once, think how you’ll turn
that page down, give the writer one more turn to teach what you were not prepared to learn in adolescence, stubborn, taciturn inclined to shut the book, mentally turn on your heel, exit the uncongenial story
which did not give your idee fixe a turn to play the diva. Less inclined to turn on Flaubert, having walked down the street Mme Moreau lived in, you know your street is also paved with stories. If you could turn doors and windows back like pages, had a listeners wit, there cl be nothing to add.
But even a silent interlocutor adds
something to a narrative, which turns
in spirals, auricular labyrinths, to add
conjunction and conjecture. (The teller adds
specifics, so the listener will learn
extreme attention.) Remember how you had
smiled and
hummed the line you knew on the ad
in the metro, history and a story
Clement wrote, Montand sang, and, one more history:
the passage from commune to commuter. Add
the station s name, a grassy path, a street
whose western limit is your own home street.
Life hums, a wire pulled taut between that street and one across an ocean. Stretch back, add East Fifth, East Sixth, East Tenth, Henry Street,
Perine Place, Natoma Street, Paddington Street.
In dream-labyrinth nights, I turn a corner, one street becomes another street in another country, yet on that street doorway flows into hallway: no need to learn my way; I know the way. Awake, I earn the daily recognition of the streets I live on, dual, counterpoint, their stories enunciate a cautious history.
Now and from memory’s clerestory, my vision of that palimpsest, a street,
(as fading daylight, gold on velvet, adds textured layer) turns outward as streetlights turn on, lights cut out lives, limits: What can I learn?
Respite in a Minor Key
I would like an unending stretch of drizzly weekday afternoons, in a moulting season: nowhere else to go but across the street for bread, and the paper.
Later, faces, voices across a table, or an autumn fricassee, cepes and shallots, sipping Gigondas as 1 dice and hum to Charpentiers vespers.
No ones waiting for me across an ocean. What I cant understand or change is distant. War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined nightmare. But waking
it will be there still, and one morning closer to my implication in what I never chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down civilian ashes.
Anyone
There was never a prelapsarian childhood
There was echoed death, the penuried silence of war,
a vague, appropriate deference to her betters.
She might have glimpsed the scrolls, she was not the one for whom they had been saved, though she was saved, from the fire that struck by
night, or the slow attrition of day to day death, to live the life of an unmarked citizen whom only the close and quotidian might betray.
She was remunerated for her labors which fed no refugees, stopped no battalions.
Uncertainly informed, she had opinions
Desesperanto Page 5