We whittled
From the wing bones of mute swans
Flutes a musician’s breath resuscitated
And Earth Mother
Humming along stirred her broth
With a nice clean tibia
Across from the Apple Store
À 115 ans, cette soupe est toujours populaire – Le Parisien
Two hundred servings of Noria’s stew –
Still they rattle the lace-curtained door
Negotiating a titbit-to-go –
My mate is sick, he can’t make it this once,
Will you give me a bite for him?
No’s the response. Come in, drop your bag,
Here’s a chair beside Mo with his jar
Of coriander, Pops, his sole flapping,
Or Viktor, the poky eater who rails
If I swab his table –
How can I eat with the smell of bleach?
Faster’s the answer. Others are waiting.
Guys with packs big as punching bags
Who say please and thank you as their elders taught them
In Bucharest Bamako Krakków
Men who just lift their bowls
And point to their stomachs. Seconds are allowed.
Gypsies, On the Road
after Baudelaire
Fire-eyed, the fortune-telling tribe left
Last night, they packed up and left, slinging tots
On their backs, offering proud appetites
The ready treasure of a pendulous breast.
Menfolk strapped with gleaming weapons
March by the wagons that hold their families,
Scanning the heavens with smouldering eyes
Heavy with regret for lost illusions.
The cricket, holed up in its sandy den,
Sees them go by and chirps even louder;
Cybele, who loves them, makes the road greener,
Makes the rocks stream and the deserts flower
For these travellers, whose way is open
To the familiar realm of a dim future.
Real Estate
A man with a sensual mouth re-knots
His scarf in the glass of the Shop
Of Ownership Dreams: room upon room
With working fireplaces, and tall windows
To tempt the out-of-doors in and frame it.
His eyes mirror the eyes of the woman
Pony-tailing her hair in an atelier d’artiste
And time for a heartbeat stops
Kicking sandwich papers and homeless cans
Around the terrace of the café
Where one might sit and watch
Roma array their wealth of yellow foam
And gaily-flowered bedding
In the capacious shadows of Saint-Sulpice.
In the Luxembourg Garden
An Eternity
They’ve been here forever, the regulars,
Jaundiced as the little copse of birch trees,
Toasted round the edges like chestnut leaves.
Three-deep they doze over book and fountain,
Haunt the lyric glade where Verlaine glares,
Rent sailboats for blonde cherubim to launch
Or school them in Guignol; on a studious bench
They straddle lovers or slump with heads thrown
Back, feet propped upon an idle chair
And let the sun fondle their flesh.
A finger marks the page, a cuff of cigarette ash
Lengthens until without a sound
It separates, winks in the iron air,
Timeless as cosmic dust confettis down.
Pelouse Interdite
The older man lopes off across the lawn
Trimmed with iron barbed to mimic bramble
And garden chairs painted an indulgent green,
Straight-backed or low-slung and comfortable
To read a book or all the afternoon
Paper in. His wife sings out his name –
He just floats on across the forbidden
Grass, skirting beds of summer bloom,
Until she wades into the pool of green,
And reaching him, tugs on his arm to lead
Him back to the established path. A guardian
Has seen them trespass – they’re not unruly –
She whistles at the two students instead,
Over by the beehives playing frisbee.
The Fête du Miel
When summer is over, the beekeepers
Sell their excess honey to the neighbours.
Is it the mythic precincts that gives
Or is it the pollution? Wishful thinking
The walls of our Garden. Blackbirds sing,
Bees suck where they will – on dog-pissed street trees
Exhaust-fuelled geraniums and ivies,
As on the blossoms of an apple tree
Coddled by a Carthusian in a monastery.
Last winter was so warm the bees thought
Summer never ended, the beekeepers write
On notices posted round the hives. ‘All winter
The bees were out foraging for nectar.
Finding little, they consumed their reserves.
There’s no honey to sell this September.’
At the Museum (Fantin-Latour)
A modest age, of buttoned up young men
And girls with strictly-parted hair
Intent on canvases and books. No one
Stares boldly from the picture frame,
The fruit is unambiguously ripe.
In age – in rage? he tried his hand at nudes:
Morning’s flamboyant curls and drowsy flesh
Dissolving into sheets of rumpled cloud;
Truth toasted by the poets in top hats.
No risky Odalisque. No erotic
Picnics on the grass. Alas! no undressed
Bourgeois gentlemen discoursing – on what? –
Their penises as silky as cocoons.
His dewy roses are for looking at.
The Queens of France
‘Pardon, Madame?’ Aggrieved, the tone.
She’s cornered an armchair, my neighbour, one
Of the comfy, low-slung ones, unmatched
For reading; and a straight one for her feet.
‘Can you stop that?’ Stop rocking on your chair,
She means, stop rocking like some antsy kid.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter, returning to Crossed
Destinies. Though now I also spy on her.
When clouds frown up our common sun
She folds Le Monde just so, stows her pen
And notebook and – what? (she stands) – a cushion
For her bum? In Mylar? In crinkled gold
Mylar engineered for some unearthly cold?
She retreats, I advance and, settling in,
Wait for light’s shadows to return and dance
Over the statues of the Queens of France.
In the Orchard
The Luxembourg Palace clock strews its chimes
Over Euclidean parterres, and a sentry
Swivels to ogle a jogger. Seasonal palms
Migrate towards the Orangerie.
Back in the southwest quadrant with the bees,
Stripped heirloom apple and pear trees
(A persimmon still indecent with fruit),
I watch the sun dip behind Montparnasse.
More ripe chestnuts plop into the grass,
The last kids are bribed off the carousel
(Baudelaire aloof on his pedestal),
And my neighbours conclude their lovers’ spat –
Chérie, je t’en prie, stop! One cold snap
And the whole baroque décor will collapse.
Défense de Pisser
The boulistes stand in a puddle of sun.
Belotte players pause over a table,
Kibitzers playing a double game. They’
ve
Recycled kitchen chairs – 50s, 60s
Chrome, laminate and vinyl-upholstered
Discards. A remnant of beige broadloom
Dresses the plywood tabletop.
Cabbies off-duty, shopkeepers, pensioners,
This is their club: L’Amicale
Des Joueurs de Pétanque, Défense de Pisser.
A snack bar sells beer and shiny helium hearts.
In alcoves, under laurels, lovers smooch,
Diminutive nymphs, elfin boys,
Their soundtracks piping what?
They serenade September’s disorder –
Blowsy maples sporting gold ruffs,
Horse chestnuts as lustrous as viols
Casting off their sea-urchin husks.
The players call time-out for a piss
And I, having children to fetch,
Will my steps towards the exit, kicking leaves.
Autumn Song
after Baudelaire
Now we will plunge into the cold shadows;
So long, dancing light of our short summers!
Already I hear the funereal blows
Of firewood ricocheting off the cobbles.
Winter is going to repossess my soul –
Anger, hate, frissons, horror, drudgery,
And like the sun caught in its polar hell
A raw frozen lump’s what my heart will be.
I shudder as each log strikes the cobbles;
A gallows’ raising would resound the same.
I feel like some tower that collapses
Under the assault of a battering ram.
Lulled by the thuds’ monotony, I dream
They nail a coffin together somewhere.
Who for? –Yesterday summer; today autumn!
The mysterious noise rings like departure.
A Stone Bench
‘Let’s go have a look at those stones’ –
I mean the jumble of tombstone-sized slabs
They dug up last spring
When they resurfaced the road past the house
And dumped
Under a mulberry tree outside Paul’s chicken run.
I want a bench like his –
A place to sit at the end of the day
And contemplate the Plain,
Roads winding through pine and cypress,
And now
In December
Wisps of smoke rising from outlying farms…
Smoke from Paul’s pipe obscuring his face;
Or that’s how it used to be: our views
Blocked by a house in what was a wedge
Of olive trees where, one snowbound Christmas,
Paul shot a pheasant
And brought it to us to pluck and roast.
It’s still in our heads, and in glimpses from the attic windows.
Paul sits on his retaining wall,
Handsaw dangling.
He’s pruning a mulberry tree: the limbs
Heaped to be sawed,
Added to the stacks in his shed.
I run my hands over the stones,
Each rough, each different, calculate the distance
To our front door,
Think of Stonehenge…
‘Stay away from the blue stones,’
Paul counsels, ‘they crumble.’
But they all look grey to me, pocked, weathered,
Laid – how long ago? – to bridge
The ditch between road and house: brute
As sculptures
Whose forms are still emerging.
A ladder pokes through the tree.
‘You ought to be careful,’ we say,
‘That trunk’s rotten, a limb could break.
Maybe yours.’
‘It makes shade in summer, I like to park
My car under it.’
‘Haven’t you got enough wood already?’
Firewood is the last crop.
Pick the cherries, pick the apricots, pick the grapes,
Pick the olives and take them to the mill,
Cut and chop wood.
My brother-in-law says that Paul has wood
For two lifetimes.
‘You never know,’ Paul says.
On ne sait jamais
One day I might not be able to cut wood.
Then I’ll be burning it
Without replacing it. And I might be cold.’
Je pourrais avoir froid…
‘If you only burn the wood
From the top of the stacks,’ I ask, curious,
‘The wood at the bottom
Was cut a long time ago?’
‘My father cut the wood
At the bottom of the piles.’
He contemplates his saw,
Adds with a sly smile:
Le vieux pour le vieux.
You Never Know
He’s no tourist, Roland swears; it’s his wife
Who won’t stay put, for her he missed
The hunting season’s opening week
For 7 Days 6 Nights in Africa –
Paul condoles. He bagged a hare,
A brace of partridge he plucked and froze –
Freezer and woodpile, they concur,
Backup for a rainy day. You never know.
A transplant to their old world,
I soak up their lore, two paysans –
Countrymen, and proud,
One unmarried, one whose son
The army has trained to be a doctor.
Roland’s eyes shine – a diminutive bird
Lit on their hotel sill.
Hues never dreamed! Not our diminished golds….
Night falls earlier now…
Inside Paul’s, a rainbow lights
The head of red-leaf lettuce
The oilcloth-protected supper table.
Four Seasons (a Draft)
Seen close up people’s eyes are mere blobs of paint
Step back and they are filled with life
And in some with immanence and imminence of death
Fullness not against but with emptiness
The apple on the bough the field of snow.
In Hockney’s Four Seasons, you see time pass
As each frame of the road merges
Seamlessly into the next loss
Autumn’s crisp renunciations spring’s silky resurrections
In my gut an ache so sharp I can’t stay
I get up
I take the escalator to another level
*
Space and motion only relative – (Leibniz?)
The watch on the wrist of the person
Pacing the deck of the moving ship, shore receding
And so forth
Ad infinitum
*
But, Monet’s magpie on a gate whose shadow
Reaches across the field of snow towards us –
But, Chardin’s russets glowing
In the pewter bowl as does eternity…?
Provisional
Stacked on the sill, gold through
And through, this morning’s view –
Six half-pint jars of eucalyptus honey
Friends arrayed last weekend
On a small sidewalk stand
On a bright-red cloth, August’s heist of honey;
And the world going by
Stops to talk and to buy
Each a share of the bee colony’s bounty,
Quintessence of summer
(Won’t last until winter)
Six lucid jars, our provision of honey.
Red Berries
This morning I walked
To the farmer’s market
Half a mile over
Half a mile back
I bought two slabs
Of the wild salmon
Sweet butter
To seize it in
A wedge of ripe cheese
(‘Ready to surrender’
– Il s’abandonne –
The goat farmer said)
And a basket
Of the red berries
Under every message
Another message
Courtly Love
Who was the poet claimed
Beauty lasts long-
Er in the flesh than in the mind?
He got that wrong
Surely, or why is she
So bothered at the thought
Of those three
Buttons undone at his throat?
They fluster her. Troubadours
Who do not know
Their ladies, they profess,
Know minds have nimble fingers
To undo
The pearly buttons of the flesh.
The Lady and the Hollyhock
Yearly, in September,
Moseying to the gym
I turn at the corner
Bookstore to the museum
Where a courtly Lady
Presides over a Garden
And its bestiary.
It’s a pretty vision.
I stick to the courtyard
Where hollyhocks have sprung
From a seam of sand
Unravelled in the paving,
Flower after lusty flower
Blazing against the wall.