1984
City so long announced come home to my dreams.
These are the days of my defeat when I long for
your anonymity, your bidets. Light me a whiffling candle,
pour me a small black coffee, send down-river your glass barges,
let your new immaculate wheels put forth on their tracks
to St Lazare, tell your best-breasted girls to expect me,
your clowns before the Beaubourg to hold their fire;
ask the crisp ready leaves of St Germain-en-Laye
to delay their plunge, the plumbing everywhere to hold back
its last laugh, the cars to polish their hubcaps.
Already stone angels in the cemetery of Père Lachaise
are trying their wings against rumours of a wind from the north.
It will be late summer, it will be autumn, it will be almost
winter and it will be winter. It will not be spring.
City so long undreamed, please look to your laurels.
Here there’s nothing but the spite of choked passages
and green bananas, nothing but the spirit of Palmerston North
going to bed in lambskins. Paris, summon me to your table.
I invite myself to your board, I accept your invitation
and my defeat. Paris, put yourself in the picture.
Paris, you don’t know yourself, haven’t spent time
after dark wandering from menu to menu reading in the rain
unable to make your mind up, haven’t eaten pans bagnats
at midday along the embankment and under bridges,
haven’t shared your toothbrush with the President of the Republic;
have never been taken upstairs by a willowy whore
with a cunt like a black fist in the half light,
never found the long passage to the little courtyard
with the broken Diana; never learned to read the clouds
or translate the litany of fountains into Old Norse;
have never been offered even a major speaking part
by the Clichy clowns whose act is silence; never
run a race with the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and lost.
Poems are not written out of a study of maps and menus.
There’s no truth in what the clouds say except when raining
and then it’s in all the papers. The concierge knows you
for what you are, she watches you entering the lift;
her eyes follow your shoulders and her ears your feet.
She will question your bed and mirror in your absence
and they will talk. A concierge is seldom happy.
‘The known appearing fully itself,’ Denise said
breaking the hairbrush, and that’s how you seem to me
this morning, Paris, drinking my café au lait: ‘Authentic’.
I salute you over the gravel and through the fountain;
I salute you through the autumn trees of the Tuileries.
Outside the cinemas of the Boule Miche, twice around
the Arc de Triomphe, all the way up the incline to Montparnasse,
I salute you between the eyes and behind the eyes.
From this marble under my hand, past the sweating waiter
in his oversize apron, through steam from pavement grilles
over the stalled line of Renaults and Peugeots and Simcas
past a yellow façade with its windows and iron balcons
up to clouds colliding in French, I salute you.
Give me your Picassos, donne-moi tous tes Matisses,
let me address the boulevards, allow me to pacify the Metro,
permit me to lay a blessing over the buttresses of Notre Dame
and stand the Seine a drink in the Chamber of Deputies.
This is my day, Paris, you will fall for me today
like a Roman Empire, like a Jacob’s laddered stocking,
like a devaluation. Paris, I wish you good morning.
Magic you are, Mr Muscle, magic you have always been
but so much is yet unspoken and would have remained so
had your neck broken before the fall of the Fourth Republic.
You have come at last and again to the city of liberation.
Up go the starlings in alarm, down come the pigeons to greet you,
out go the trains and in comes the breath of the soul.
The cobbles are trying your feet, the handsome birthdays
of the five saints are spinning in their Russian revolver,
the blood-red typists are walking into the sun.
There will never be a notion so brilliant as this actual,
these surfaces giving yourself without recognition,
without name, with only the tattered rags of a language,
with the eyes of a child let loose in a field of flowers.
Paris has its hand in your pocket, its escalators
are touring your dreams, its gendarmes directing
with whistles and truncheons the flow of your blood.
Lie down among stars along the Champs Élysées,
let them sing to you of a famous victory over death,
stamp into every line the determined blood of your birth.
Here’s Catherine Deneuve she’s walking under klieg lights
against a garish mural brilliant in the deepest bolgia
of the new Les Halles – hesitates, lights cigarette,
walks on. The cameras love her and so do you.
Take her to coffee in your head. Take her to bed.
On the escalators gipsy children have picked your pocket
and in the dingy gendarmerie you hammer out a statement.
Disguised as a spaniel she waits in a nearby café
drinking thé citron and rehearsing her fabulous lines.
Through cloud cover out of sight the force de frappe is drilling
for the first blue sky when they will drape their jet-trails
at an anniversary over the Arc de Triomphe.
Forever new, Catherine looks up and smiles.
‘Thin girls die young,’ say the graffiti ‘and that leaves
fat old women.’ You feel yourself drifting away
over traffic, through the jostle of falling leaves,
above the cold shoulder of a statue staring down whitely
at a girl on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens weeping
at the thought of Catherine Deneuve. Your name may be Truffaut
but there’s no end in sight. This Paris is like a disease.
Losing yourself you keep your hold on grammar,
and now by way of crescendo a white dove flies out
of the face of Magritte, or is it by way of diversion?
You have come a long way to enter the bathroom of Bonnard,
to take to task Picasso in the light of a Cubist dawn,
to look through Matisse’s window at the palms of his hands
as they’re blown against the blue of a Mediterranean night.
Loneliness has honoured you with a singleness of vision
that admits you to the frame. There will be no charge.
The morning is a paradigm of vermouth, cool and dry
and heady as you walk across the Pont Neuf already
making for the end of a story. Paris, take this down:
the sweeper is losing his argument with the breeze,
the leaves are storming the Bastille, a priestly cassock
wants heaven now, this world is climbing and flying;
the thin pale clouds are enacting nineteen-forty
for a silent movie; everything is written on the river
in a foreign language, everything engraved on the sky
with a silver tip. Paris, you ancient sewer,
my spectacles and my shoe-leather embrace your ways.
It is because we’re all to die that we visit Paris –
not that we want salvation or think eternity possible
or believe more fervently in God than in the bathroom,
nor in Notre Dame with its burning bushes of candles,
but that this is an arcane language we can turn an ear to
as to the thrush on a wet evening, knowing more or less
its import without understanding. This and the sense that
not being gods or angels we have slipped right by
the frontier guards and are walking invisible in a heaven
of plausible dimension leading by cobbled backstreets
to breadsticks, berets and bicycles of favourite old movies.
Paul Gauguin came to our ocean for similar reasons
and the blood still shows on the walls of the Beaubourg.
Night is certainly a laboratory in which are made
colours of the trees, the river and the morning sky,
and you’ll need your wits about you walking home
through the cold dawn without a visible presence
seeking only the safest route to the Rue Madame.
To the riddle of Life the best short answer may be Death
This is where the President of the Republic spends his afternoons.
Here’s the street where his motorcade passes. From this dais
he pins on ribbons and medals and kisses wrinkled cheeks.
He’s the one who decides whether fish in your southern ocean
should wear water-wings or grow two heads.
Sometimes he leans to the left sometimes to the right,
sometimes he’s ten feet tall, sometimes he accepts diamonds
but the bombs go off on time. Here’s his mistress.
She has two breasts both of them strangely beautiful
when seen from the south. This is the Rue de la Paix.
Here’s the boulevard where workers from the regions march
demanding a bright new numeral for the Republic.
This is the Quai d’Orsay, this the Aerogare des Invalides.
Climb aboard and we’ll take you for a picnic in the Bois
where there are no bombs. Paris will never again
suffer the indisposition of the boots of a foreign invader.
Even the army will fight. Be careful of the hard-boiled eggs.
In ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ of Manet only the lady is naked.
In the eyes of the President are tears for the love of France
while he pours the wine. Nor will the franc be devalued.
Poems have been written on roof-slates, starlings
are drinking diamonds, the webs between the branches
have been renewed this early winter morning
as the cabs encircle once more the Place de la Concorde.
Paris has washed the face of the obelisk
and the rain has gone leaving an unutterable sky
admiring itself between shadows on a secretive river.
I’m alone with millions and that seems more than enough
with coffee and croissants and a generous jug of tears.
My love will be broadcast at eight to the underworld
which is not Paris, the world which Paris is not
where you may be walking at dusk not thinking of me.
How is it that such a tenderness must die
leaving no trace but colours squeezed out of tubes,
scratched on roof-slates, caught a moment in the webs,
observed if at all only by a passing cloud?
Dear children of the goddess of lonely light,
all those who have loved this body full of voice
and whom it loves, accept the blessings and praise
of the poet of Paris who stirs you into his coffee.
Now is the night we used to call Symbol of Death
but there’s water through branches and lights and stars on the water.
Showing at the cinema on the far side of the square
is your movie with Catherine Deneuve – yes already it’s made.
She kisses you in a mirror and the cats on the mansard
quote Rimbaud at the moon, which answers in French.
The glass doors open inward, the shutters push out,
and there beyond the balcony railing it runs
the silver ribbon of your thought rebuffed by the light.
Here you can see why Chagall’s lovers float up
through branches to join the stars – it’s the shortest route
to a high old time and not as difficult as walking.
In the Rue Mazarine your table is waiting in a window.
Will she be there with her neat and busy bush?
Go out among these hands that are pure conjecture.
As wine touches the tongue, as eyes exchange,
as a voice caresses an uncomprehending ear,
do not neglect to dictate these informal strictures
with all their whims of glass, their glosses on lust,
to the Paris of Paris that’s nobody’s dream but your own.