THREE PARIS ELEGIES*
Jerome Rothenberg
from A Paradise of Poets (New Directions, 1999)
1
into my own dark sunday light aproaches like
the moon through feathers that's no sooner
seen than sunk by blindness & the thought
that everyone is dead around a city that's
bout to vanish as it has before sucked down
an empty pocket oversized & with a smell
of earth the bright adventurers of 1910
whose streets these were sharing a common grave
with those who followed reaching even
to the place where you and I are waiting
with the friends who drop out one by one
like cybermonkeys flying into mindless space
2
above a gorge we hung
& swayed
the mountains were alive to every side
stone witnesses
the air was still with only a distant puff
of wind
we sat suspended by an iron wire
voiceless
no one to talk to in the world
but you & me
a silence between earth & sky
that revelation
I think I prize its emptiness the most
so even now arrived in paris
I sit alone
& feel it bursting from my chest
electric
final
rush of footsteps down an empty street
3
why does a well-dressed man come up to me
& ask me for a handout?
(this is a dream, I think, it can't be real)
why does a smiling mother dressed for church
reach out a hand to touch me shadows all around
her sitting on the ground
why does she ask for help
& why do I keep walking walking past her
where there is no street or sun
even in paris on this hottest day in summer
what is the sound that comes at us around
a corner sound of a wave suspended in the air
of hives of bees of hands applauding in the dark
who is the man who wears a flower in his ear
a shirt with many folds a vest a beard
the buttons glowing like electric sparks
the more I search his features I can see
his lips are gone his tongue is heavy hanging
to one side & forming words that never
reach me that the darkness covers
all the people on this street sit flat
against a wall some open-eyed some sunk
in a deep sleep
all are dressed up
the men wear business suits & blazers a cardogan
a double breasted jacket a tuxedo tie & tails
but have no coats or hats
their shoes are simple always a dark brown
or black with marks of sand from garden walks
in paris laces open sometimes without socks
& the women well dressed too although the hair
of one is hanging limply with another's there
are open spots that show her skull
a third one has the traces of a beard
a large wet stain under one armpit
just look at them & they begin to talk
the way that birds talk
feathers that the wind is blowing swirl
across the square
we sit in paradise & pass a ball between us
papers at our feet
then when it's time to leave we walk around
a corner climb the little flight of stairs
& hear them following
the rush of music from a distant time
a woman's voice becoming regular
the words emerging low & high relentless
openings processions
& it's picasso in the lead a little man
with hairy shoulders he has stripped down
to his running shorts like frank o'hara
both of them now stars for minneola prep
both now declare their love of evil
with apollinaire here too his head
no bigger than a thumbnail flanked by
gertrude stein eyes like a crazy doll's
& someone looking like my father max jacob
wrapped in a monk's brown cloak down
which his body disappears
here in a world where there are only
little people phantoms where the sky is not
a sky the earth is shrinking daily under
silver plastic disappearing slipping
through my hands like balls in a pachinko
parlor eyes revolving like red lights
to end here in la ripublique with all
the other dead the hungry ghosts under
our windows a soup kitchen for the dead
the ones who run the ones who squat
now on the grass
they speak our frailty the doom built
into life decomposition chaos anarchy
confusion worse confounded helter skelter
squalor
out of whack & out of order out of kilter
out of money out of time & out of place
& out of breath & out of work & out of hope
& out of power
because the men who come to us though dead
are just like us & stare at us like fallen
princes
we welcome you to death they say
their looks dividing us in two
the numbers dance again behind our eyes
the circles break
the man holding a clock up to his ear
will count the silence
every day is summer
what was once alive is gone
& what has yet to be alive
is also gone
Jerome Rothenberg
Paris
August/September
1997
Posted over on
Rothenberg's Homepage
