Those were the days, though not for those who lived them.
Flaubert’s people were at the heart of things,
the eye of the nineteenth century’s storm.
Still it passed them by:
*
Fresh from slipping the Maréchale one Frédéric returns
to the woman who, though she does not know it,
lives only inside his head.
Even to herself she is no more than half-there,
however totally described.
The language enfolds her. Later it embalms her.
*
The men are rudderless, bobbing like those balloons
that overflew the siege of Paris:
they roll on frictionless, leaving holes in the air.
Minnows caught in the slipstreams of their own stories,
they tremble for a moment upcurrrent, then are gone
into the next instalment, the next word.