Snowfall and Oysters

Things held together by 'roundness'.
Characters met in dreams, stand,
toy soldiers, alert, but cold to the touch.

My access to the room, where fragile things,
from memory are laid one upon the other,
in danger of being broken.

-:-

Lacking the words! Down the corridor for an orange. Pad, pad, pad on the black nylon floor. Moments of darkness as I turn on and off the lights.  An orange vanishes.

-:-

Late night is a time for poets. Peace after a long day under attack, the daytime throb to think and survive, to premeditate, to earn, is finished. Night comes, and brings peace. Solace, for full or empty stomachs, for breathing, for bleeding, for the wounded who wait. Night comes, bringing peace for poets.

-:-

Here waits the cool olive solace of my typewriter. Olivetti green, my hospital walls.

Jeff and the others cross the lawn, carrying guns. I see them, and want to run the film back, but I cannot. It is a dream, broken by the sound of a glazier's knife on glass, or a mason's trowel upon bricks and cement, or a teacher's chalk on the blackboard, or the painter's scraper abrading cracked and peeled paint from the clapboards.

Knives on whetted stone.

Time to sleep again.

-:-

I leave the apartment with my bag, umbrella, and my portable typewriter and walk outside.

Snow is falling, heavy wet flakes. The concierge's cat plays against the window trying to grab the pieces of snow as they float past. Mr. Rabelais, the concierge, is inside watching too. We laugh, through we can only see, not hear each other.

The snow falls fast. It accumulates on the outside of my clothing, the brims of hats, and on the grass in the park along Avenue Foch. The streets are still wet, the pavements melt the flakes as soon as they touch.

I take the metro, then get out, and cross Place de la Concorde. It is thicker now, and I'm leaving footprints. Gradually the snow is turning the world into shades of white and grey. I look into the Tuileries. All the gravel surfaces there are white.

I enjoy for a moment, the unsteady, slippery pavement.

-:-

I stayed, long enough to watch autumn prepare the trees for winter.

After the first frost, the maples, the beech and oaks made a display, a final dance. The reds trembled, the yellows and scarlets shimmered. Then they fell, threw themselves to the earth, and the branches they left were gray and black and brittle. The sap ran out of them, to the roots in the ground.

This somehow brought to my mind a woman I thought I knew, or wanted to know. When the icy frost dealt the leaves a fatal blow, her wound poured out the colors of her life. At night the sound of them dropping lightly on each other was her faint voice, whispering. In the damp leaves that emerge beneath the snow in the spring, I saw fragments of her face. In the green buds that are held dormant all winter I saw her smiling.

-:-

Ideas are bubbles, that will eventually find their way
out of any sunken ship.
The force of thought is weak,
but the force of will too strong to find its way.
Ours is a patient receptive mind,
that is spoiled by what it knows, but saved
by what it feels.

-:-

The moon is ringed by an icy halo, frosted lines of yellow etched in the sky.

The boulangerie and patisseries put their moist smells of Christmas banking out into the street.

I admit sweethearts to my rooms, to the warm halls of memory and experience, where echoes and laughter brighten this chapter of my life. A petite blond girl, I divide her little fruit, with my tongue.

It's a quiet morning in the rear courtyard of Avenue Foche. A refrigerator is humming somewhere.

I ate Christmas dinner in the kitchen with Marie Rose, Madeleine and Jeannette. Their faces are exaggerated, comic in their simple routines, replays of Molière.

Roast chicken, baked apples with jam, boudin blanc, boudin noir, creme de marrons, and huitres. I ate the oysters hoping I'm not allergic to the shellfish on this side of the Atlantic.

In the middle of the night I awoke, and vomited for ten minutes into a white plastic bag. My stomach processed everything except for one tiny part of each oyster. I count them. Some footy mantled part. Exactly eight. What a clever organ, the stomach. I gargled, flushed the poison down the sink, and feeling much relieved, fell fast asleep.

-:-

Sickness, feeling the nearness of death -
A comforting thought to me now, shivering.
How to replace the vacuum left inside me.
Her going may break my will.
Did I know how deeply I was falling in love with her?

-:-

I navigate in the dark with my cat's sense of the walls.
I know the doors that are open, I know the doors that are closed. I know where their handles are.
What is to explain this?
And all the many senses we have within us?

I'm losing my days,
to silly problems that could have been foreseen.
I could have steered away,
But now I must bear the consequences.

I wish I had used my cat's sense in time.

-:-

I found a place for a month. It is quiet, it has a table and light.
But it is a boat, and it jerks all day at its moorings.
How can I write when I am ill?

-:-

I am living in the womb of a city
On the twisted confluences of a river
Filled with bottles, cans, choked with mud
It flows anyway.
I float on it.

Everything around makes this city famous
Everything and nothing
I have to walk far to find the life I love
The country is far, trees are far, birds are far.
I am surrounded by works of man.
But I live on a river
That is not the work of man.
Through the center of the city it flows,
alive.

-:-

The Woman who Could Not Swallow

Daniel introduced his wife as 'Baroness Cathleen de Varennes'.

"Where do we go?" she demanded.

I led her, with Daniel, down the hall. "Do you want breakfast? You must be starved. Perhaps you are tired and want to see your bedroom."

I had been told she was a young woman, but she looked ancient. The bones of her skull loomed beneath a sickly parchment.

Daniel threw her bag at the foot of the bed, then headed back to the drawing room to use the phone.  The Baroness kept talking.

"I can't swallow. The last time I actually swallowed a piece of food was in 1979. Solid food doesn't go down. My esophagus is almost closed shut."

I stood there.

"It is equally very difficult for me to swallow liquids. That's why I like them hot. Very, very hot. And sweet. You can put the entire box of sugar in my coffee if you like. It helps it to go down. Of course if I have liquids too hot, too often, that's not good either. It cooks my throat, or can start a cancer.

"The muscle to my stomach is, how do you say, lame? It can't close. The juices from my stomach come up and starts all sorts of problems.

"If I had a lame leg I would knock on it and comment on how well it is carved. It is no problem for me. Yes, I lost quite a bit of weight. I was eating ice cream and sugar and butter in an effort to keep my weight up but eventually my stomach wouldn't process it anymore and my heartbeat became slow with all the cholesterol."

The Baroness' hair lies in patchy strands on a bald scalp. The long strands are so carefully curled over her temples. There are no curves to her, though it is possible to see that she was once attractive. Her front teeth seem at first so perfect, until one notices they are exactly alike, the same color and shape, gums all of a piece. All are false.

Daniel is a young man. I know him to be the same age as Bailey, though he has put on a lot of weight. I asked him about work.

"Well, I haven't been indicted," he said, referring to the recent crackdowns on investment bankers for insider trading.

"Those SEC boys are damn clever. The crooks get away by spilling  beans on the others. The accomplices, those that provide information, have the book thrown at them. It's awful."

I wondered if Daniel saw himself as an accomplice or a crook. He's a survivor, he married the Baroness. How long before he was alone with her title, and family land back in Hungary.

"We have a party this evening we have to go to," Daniel lamented.

Something they had to do to keep up appearances, to please the Baroness. Possibly it was a gathering he anticipated, but made seem like a kind of duty..

"That little party", Bailey said, was a do, at Maxim's. Bailey was miffed. He hadn't been invited.

I agreed, it is poor form not to invite one's host.

I didn't need to see the inside of Maxim's. I had visited once, paid for by a lavish Arab who was entertaining Miss India. I got bored, ate, drank too much, then walked home.

The Baroness foraged in her bag, then brought out a bottle of Pálinka, a distilled liqour from the steppes of Hungary. "This is for Monsieur Bailey."

It had a peculiar royal crest on it, one with a bent cross at the tip. Maybe she called the bottle Slivovitz, no matter. She'll give it to Bailey. Then he'll put it on his silver tray next to the Gran Marnier and Cherry Herring.

Return from Paris

Back in New York City with an awful headache. Air thick with soot and humid. Perhaps this evening it will storm.

These are my first hours in America - I have been gone ten months. While all is clear I'll write my thoughts. Perhaps then I'll sleep, and the pain in my head will go away.

Last moments in Paris:

I made cheese omelettes for a last lunch with France-Aimee at my place on Rue Milton.

I was packed and ready to go when she came over at eight. All I had to do was fix the dinner. With the omelettes we had a tomato salad, afterwards some oranges and cherries. She insisted on seeing all the drawings that I made at Gare Austerlitz, so I showed them to her.

She was not wild about them. However when I showed her one of the watercolors I made in India she really responded. "I see genius," she said. To me this sounded like a silly stylization, like Pound who said, "Genius? I specialize in it." Somehow it was not flattering because it was not true, not the way she said it.

Earlier in the day I said goodbye to B____, watched his bald head go down into the Metro. He was on his way out to Maillet to visit his cousin Perrine, after eating lunch at his local hangout near Pont Neuf. That restauranteur took a great interest in my sketchbook after B____ opened it up to show him some of the drawings. B____ has a way of making a public demonstration about any piece of art that happens to be around, and I think he gets a sort of masochistic pleasure out of embarrassing the owner. He plays the role of professor saying, "This is quite good, but this one you see just doesn't work as well. Perhaps you should work it up again in color." I know B____ well, as a friend. His faults fascinate me, and over the years I'm able to see into their causes.

Then France-Aimee drove me to Gare du Nord, parked her car and went to look for a hand cart while I stood by my luggage. Typewriter, sketchbooks, sculptures, I stowed them on the train. As we had some time we walked together to the end of the platform. I felt a sudden longing to be there a few more days so that I could study and draw this place. The new Paris railroad stations had been a favorite of the Impressionists. Monet's famous canvas of Gare St. Lazarre was of a brilliant glass-roofed structure, filled with billowing smoke and steam from the new locomotives. Today at Gare du Nord, that giant hulk was nearly opaque, stained by years of grime and debris and bird droppings. Manet lived nearby, and patrolled these platforms often, the station bars serving beer, the bustle of women in their long dresses and gentlemen in their tall hats, strolling the boulevards of Baron Haussmann nearby.

The sun was just setting. An orange hue cloaked the high row of low-cost houses that overlooked the station yard. The ties between the tracks took on a deep blue-black. I imagined my father squinting at the source of light, to distill it's color, before jabbing his brush into the paint.

The towers and bridges were were a severe inky jet, in profile. More bridges crossed the tracks here than at Gare Austerlitz. These are realms where steel industry pushed an iron artery deep into the heart of the city. Yet Gare du Nord has an intimate setting. The blue metro trains were rumbling periodically over their steel constructions. I felt the pulse of the city as never before, precisely because it was quiet and forlorn.

Then into the scene burst a new train, one I had never seen before. It was orange and white and had two levels, two rows of windows and was built very high, even higher than the double decker buses. It seemed like a row of modern houses on the move, as if Manet's old boulevard of freshly cut sandstone had suddenly taken wheels.

France-Aimee told me she was very much amused by my love of industrial places, train yards and factories. We walked back to the head of the platform arm in arm. I confessed to her that I had wanted to walk arm in arm often before. She even said she would have wanted it too. We talked about the other night when I left. I had dinner with her on the boat, and she said she had not wanted me to leave. I asked her if I could kiss her on the lips and she said 'No' but I kissed her anyway. A little kiss.

She was smiling. "I have lots to tell you," she said.

"Well start now."

"No, not now"

"Then when?"

She's planned a trip to the US in August. Perhaps because I have so few expectations I anticipate seeing her again so much. I enjoy her company. I liked the feeling of her little arm crooked in mine as we walked.

We said goodbye without much emotion, except we had to tear ourselves away a little. We were more entangled than we realized. It kind of spun us both around, and cracked smiles on both our faces when we parted. She went walking off.

Immediately, almost nervously, upon getting on the train, my lingering attraction for France-Aimee transferred itself to a young girl sitting opposite me in my compartment. There were six passengers, all strange to one another. Her legs touched both of mine, and a long period of eye contact ensued that had me convinced that a great erotic train journey had finally come to me. She is a ballerina for the Paris Opera, and is only twenty-one years old. Some quality arose from her that was so needing physical contact that we indulged staring into each other's eyes, smiling and letting our faces become drawn with emotion. But only an hour after the train left Paris it stopped in Longueau and she got off. We both agreed it was a shame. Her parents live in Amiens, which is nearby.

I slept for the rest of the train journey, two of the other passengers, both schoolteachers, one from Tallahassee Florida who teaches college students, the other Irish, who teaches French to young children, argued their points of view about television, and home entertainment. The American boasted of the television sets he had in the house, the video tape recorders and all the tapes he has of old movies, which he likes to be able to watch whenever he wants. The Irish fellow said, "Who needs all that stuff? Doesn't it weigh you down?"

Stevo was in London as promised. We shared some coffee and danish, then he ran off to a meeting but before he left he gave me the key to his New York apartment and made me take twenty pounds.

It was one of the strangest meetings with a person so close to me, my own nearest brother. Such a short piece of time. Yet our bond was still there. Brotherhood, in Victoria Terminal, London, just as if it was in our little hometown of Woodbury, Connecticut when we were children.

For the remainder of the morning I marveled at the strangeness of life, and tried to pry loose its secrets as I recognized old London haunts from the bus window on the way to Heathrow airport. It was all there, the work, the long hours, the misery cashing those difficult checks of Ismail's, the walks on the weekends up and through the maze of city streets. My nights with Anna and hours spent bringing her to climax, and then our beautiful breakfasts after in her Chelsea flat. And the feeling of liberation that inevitably resulted, when she 'threw me out'. It was her cycle. She was a tigress who bites afterwards.

I beheld the detail in the bricks that I recognized I wondered if they are the same bricks, my bricks, my London, the same place where I was at so many other times in my life. It seems miraculous that a place can be so well remembered, and so much of it, when seen after a long absence.

I watched the movie during the flight home without sound. I had ideas, took notes, and slept. When I awoke all the stewardesses stood around smiling at me. They were laughing and smiling, asking me over and over, did I want some lunch? This made me wonder what I had been saying during my sleep, or what I had been doing. So I asked them and they said "Nothing at all!". I must have looked different after awaking, like some confused kitten. I never could explain it. For the remainder of the flight they hardly paid me the same attention. One of the girls was quite pretty, a blonde, with a short streak of grey hair near her forehead.

New York water is softer, more difficult to rinse soap off with, has a silky feeling, but smells strongly of chlorine. It's true what they say, the milk here is thin and tasteless.

What a city! I noticed most of all, the skyscrapers, a population of glass and metal giants, an island cluttered with towers. What made these New Yorkers into a race of tower-builders? I saw on one side of the road that lead towards Manhattan, rows of gravestones, on the other, miles and miles of factory buildings, industrial suburbs.

Technological life, physical death. The forces of matter and mind meet in New York, glass and steel and flesh, all collided, governed by some unworldly idea, hatched beyond the vision of any human being.

Duck Pate

 In Marseilles I met Perrine,
 Who made a lunch of fresh terrine.
 The pate seemed a trifle crude,
"Do tell Perrine, about good French food.

 "Our masculine cuisine does love that stench.
 "Are English men so different than French?
"Yes the English take their pheasant rotten,
 "While the French eat birds, just freshly gotten."

Dancing Girl

On a bench in a dancing hall,

I met a girl, from Montréal.

She could sing, but could not dance,

So she sang of Paris, France.
Duck pate, she said was rude,

But most French food, is generally good.

Vierzon

I

Swallows flit above the tracks in the maze of high tension wires.
A jukebox mush clashes,
with the screech of a cappuccino machine.

Switching seats, I ripped my shirt - no matter, it's an old one.

Rain in abundance, the grass,
the trees, the leaves and flowers all in abundance.

The sun peeks through clouds
There is plenty, abandoned, growing, with abandon.
The trees grow, the weeds grow.
No one stops them.


II

Stuck in Vierzon,

"A life view, belongs, as you belong, to them,
  Your life even is not your own, your awareness is not of one life but of all life,

  Courage, you may take in this."


III

Slender water in furrows slender by the tracks
A calm yielding fog, misting.
Barns loom a river swollen, over its banks
Trees midstream, below water,
A man in a garden shed
Where hoes and rakes are kept.

Rails grinding, metal polishing metal
Small leaves on trees, soft yellow
Sheep in field, tufts of cotton
An aqueduct monorail spanning sage.


IV

The next train doesn’t come.

I write - when thinking can't.
Future tidal forces of change
My mind is distended by super gravitation
A sphere, a hollow tube, by super gravitation.

Pride in achievement, all yours,
All dreams, all truths, all that is, grows, or dies, yours,
Now, you must leave it here, you too must leave yourself behind, when you go.

"I'm stuck in Vierzon."
I ask myself:
"Who is talking?"

Horses

A night of memory, searching for the front room,
the paneled room, the one with windows.

Who was with me?
I sought to scare it, ghoulish thing, out of hiding.
I turned up a list of things forgotten.

Clear silent, intact, existing, perfect six-sided blossoms.
Spun glass inhabiting vacuums.
Webs impossible to walk without disturbing.
A texture of flesh and sweaters.

Yesterday's equal to ten years ago,
equally a twisting tube,
an echo - else more perfect than before.

Chiding, 'Hush up! Shut up!'
Her wig, her head wound.
Dawn birds starting the day, only time to manifest.
Or prove something, tireless,
again and again.

The inheritances are all wound tightly, unspooled for me
unclaimed, perfectly rendered, without dust.

France crow's call, early morn.
India crow call,
New England crow call.
Was the ground frozen?

An all-red autumn, horses stand, in clouds of their own breath.

Tugboats

Mind a mess - I slept too late.
'Hautil', 'Mantois', tugboat names,
after an awful dream, a van stuck in mud.
Then a bus took Anna's car away,
they went towards north Paris.
Anna, with her blonde hair,
morning headache, hangover, yawning,
Friends arrive tomorrow . . .
Dogs haul sledges, snarl at the owner of the farm.
Fried turbot for lunch, pale yellow,
Marie-Rose unpacks glasses, at the new appartement.

The Feast

A raccoon feasted on oysters at midnight,
left a mess of shells split, cracked, open wide and dry.
White dust, fertilizer powder, and pearls.

I was that raccoon.

Shattered shards,
 white vases, and confetti,
  broken vows, a hillock of dishes,
   covered in white cloth.

A mess of broken things, waiting repair.
  are they kept
  for memory?

It is springtime.
 An opened window lets flies into the room.
 They buzz in
 find the air too cool to please them,
 turn in a lazy circle,
   and buzz back out.

Argenteuil sous la Neige

Clouds behind clouds,
Monet's blue lyricism,
brush strokes
made small canvases seem large . . .

Monet's blue,
I know just the kind of day that was.
near freezing, my feet were wet,
The sun was low, glowing at the horizon, before it set.

I held skates
in my cold left hand.
shoes untied, snow inside them.
Cold, I smelled woodsmoke.

The neighbor's dog was barking.

Voice

London trodden alleys,
slippery with broken fruit.

Berwick cockney sellers are calling
a gut literature of English,
a street map of Empire,
in all it's spoken forms,

Every sound the British throat can make,
at home and abroad.

Stravinski's fire feathers
are sent in all directions,
gifts from the Prince.

Suddenly, I fear that I could be murdered,
and my murderer might not know her own mind.

Going to Lyon

It's a quiet Sunday,
on the platform,
a motor hums, then clicks.
Swallows flit about in the electric wires.

Two kids play in the baggage carts.
at the end of the yard
A man steps from a glass office.
holding a long paddle,
He waves it, and blows a whistle.

The engineer sees him,
The train starts to roll,
quiet, the cars hum a little,
a homeless person walks alongside.

One pantographs sputters
and drops to the roof of the engine.
It glides, ever increasing speed.
The electric sulfur smell, burnt eggs . . .

Twenty cars full of people,
disappear into a maze of track.

The café dish clatter becomes loud again.
Signals turn to green.
The starter ambles back to his glass office.
He's just a boy,
wearing a man's uniform.

The Wolf

In darkened rooms,
on Avenue Foche,
along a small corridor of
'chambres des bonnes',
I smell the guano, of bats.
and hear them rustling at night.

They are in the crevices of these stone walls,
the old grand homes have become caves.

A radio plays Prokofiev,
I am near tears, at the thought,
of a large black wolf.

There's a convocation at a local university,
to celebrate the anniversary, of the Revolution,
Francois Mitterrand is the honored guest.
He speaks in French and is pronounced,
Doctor of Laws.

I walk for soup, to my one-franc spot,
where the waitresses are blonde,
and speak Russian.
And on the way home I notice how
all Paris is blonde now,
all the stones are creme-colored.
Centuries of soot are bleached away.

Down the glowering streets,
past sentries saluting,
screams the motorcade of the President.

I think to shout, "Vive la France!",
But in an instant, they roar past.

Song for P__

'Eiffel Tower' Caroline Gogh

She tells me of her weekend,
on the island,
the girls that went with her
stuffing high-fashion gowns
into overnight bags
to the house of the arms dealer,

We were like heifers,
she said,
we helicoptered in
men could take our favors,
more gowns to choose from
we could be jumped at any moment.

They followed me for a week,
when I went to Tripoli.
I only slept with his brother
in a compound,
guarded by wolves.

Littered about her simple room
ankle deep, she wades through
heaps of clothes,
all the houses of Paris.

On her countertop
thousand frank notes piled deep
gifts from her men
to and from the health spa,
cab-fares home.
from an exercise club
nearLuxembourg Gardens,
champagne and profiteroles
at Brasserie Balzar.

She let down
that desire to convince
it was simply goodbye to her prince,
on the sidewalk.

I saw how tough she was
as she talked about an infection
she was fighting,
some nerd in the rest room at Maxim's,
put his finger into her.

Unsure
how she fit
into a dress that needed
alteration.
Don't look, she said, as she dropped
everything she was wearing.

Her nose
appeared flattened.
A fighter
in a modern city.

Stuck in Vierzon

Wheat fields, slender water in furrows
Calm yielding fog. Misting.
Barns loom.

Life view, belonging.
I belong.
Your life even is not yours,
   my awareness is not mine.

Take courage in this.

Write - when the thinking is right
tidal forces of change
mind distended by super gravitation
a sphere becomes a hollow tube

pride, achievements, all are yours, all dreams, all truths that are,
   all that is, grows, is yours.

now you must leave it here,
   you must leave yourself behind, when you go.

Stuck in Vierzon,
even though I’m here I ask myself
     where the hell is Vierzon?

.

Abandon

Train moving again,
a morning crow calls.
Footsteps on a metal grate,
a distant church spire rises.

Green river swollen, over its banks, rushing
trees midstream, below water, roots submerged
a man in a garden shed, stands
where the hoes and rakes are kept.

Small leaves glow soft yellow . . .
Sheep nibble wet alfalfa cotton
metal wheels grind metal rails
moving through the wheat

Crops in abandon, buildings in
abandon
people walking,
with
abandon.

The trees grow, no one stops them.
Even we,
would not wish to stop them.

Trees Burn

Trees burn
their leaves burn,

Bright heels together,
a brilliant plan shining,
on the damp ground.

Shall I make an omelet
in this old copper pan?

Leaves

Burnt acorn smell by the Royal Hospital,

Oak leaves pad the sidewalks,
A wet thick fog from the river.

A pensioner with
      a little money to spend on cigarettes,
walks the grounds.

Steady hands clasped,
       another, battles are behind him

A survivor in a bathrobe advances
     stops, cane rooted, checks the yellow sky.

The leaves, withered brown, for months, cling on.

Torn by wind, or
     by the next front moving in.

Tonight, darkness and more wind,
     I miss the frost that turns the leaves
     a thrilling red.

Butte Chaumont

The trees of Butte Chaumont!
I know their shapes,
their branches, forked,
they took the same turns I took.
We know each other.
and when I first see them again
their needles tremble.

Antoine Gasq makes sculptures
at one-one-eight Rue des Couronnes.
I stopped in to visit him,
his face whitened when he saw me
“It is not possible” he said, in French.

“Mark I was just talking about you,
. . . five minutes ago,
for the first time I think,
. . . in years.”

“Do you recognize this?” he asked, and patted a table covered with figures.
“I think of you every time I put something down”, he said.

Pictures of his children dusty with plaster,
Were tacked above the desk.
Six years ago, before I saw him last
the first was not born.
He is working well
And about to move to a bigger studio
in the suburbs.

He turns to a cabinet and produces some cognac.
Time for a break.
He pours two glasses, on the old table.

"Salut!"

The girls at the Patisserie on Rue de Belleville
are grown up, and probably married.

I recognized them,
They did not recognize me.

I bought a pear tart,
which they wrapped in the same paper
just as their mother wrapped sweets
when they were little and watching
how she did things.

Some things do not change.

River Seine

I live in the womb of a city
On the twisted confluence of a river,
Filled with bottles, cans, choked with mud.

It flows anyway.
I float on it.

Everything made this city famous
Everything and nothing.
I must walk far to find the life I love
The country is far, forests are far.

I am surrounded by works of man
But live on a river
Not the work of man

Through the city the water floats,
I drift on it.