No contest, she says: if it’s book or man, then
give me book. Wiser, more compassionate,
between promise and delivery
a smaller gap. Just think of Lorca,
that ‘professional Andalusian’,
as Borges, disappointed, called him.
Better a beautiful and doomed illusion
than that. I mean, the page is clean
and safe so why get close to Hemingway,
or that sputtering basket-case girl-
friend of his, Stein, unless they’re locked
between covers? Fleuri or Fleurus,
leurs chemins et leurs rues are all
the same to me, leading nowhere
but darkness at noon. Heartless, gutless,
penniless, dead: between being
and nothingness lies nausea —
who needs it? The philanderer,
whiner, anti-Semite — you name
them — they can all keep their gutters
out of my head; instead, I’ll caretake
their starry artifice so I can still
accompany the great pretenders
lovingly to bed, or into these
sunlit gardens where the good
children of the inner arrondissements
63sail their boats and the clever
play low-stakes games of chess, and
never catch the ragged black-
birds in the bushes with their cocked
heads eavesdropping
for seeds of fallen speech to take
back to their filthy nests.
If that’s the news, he thinks, he’d rather
have the olds: glory days, his party
on the rise, sweet noise of victory
and then so much to do. The young,
unbuttoned, lounge — two chairs at once,
their feet on one, their children on
the loose, too loud and not at all
reined in. He folds the paper neatly by
its middle seam, closes his eyes.
The dream returns to lead him
by the hand through tracer-punctured
darkness till the familiar fear
jerks his collar and he’s back
on the bench with the screaming
kids, the flowerbeds, and in his lap,
the news.
The third has disappeared
into a thicket, where only
a scribble of leaves marks
his progress through
the text. He makes you play
detective, sheriff, or black-
hatted vigilante. The excited cloud
of finches he’s dislodged
will rise up singing then rain down
their phrases to evaporate on
your jacket before you can
decipher their intent.
The wily reader, by now deep
in the woods, rustles, but
you’ve got his scent, you’re on
his trail. There’ll be a sentence
at the end of this, you say,
yessirree, this one’s no reader:
he’s a writer, on his way
to steal another man’s cattle.
The tin star gleams a moment
on your chest — but then
theme music swells and fades
you in to the next scene,
in which you’re just
as lost as he is.