Bread and butter, un p’tit crème at the counter,
handshakes for old customers coming in,
the small routine and nicety of gratitude
for my ten francs’ worth of business,
then back to the trottoir again.
What luck!
Ahead of me steps a girl
born to high heels and brisk decisions.
Her long legs wear a film of hose or pants
(what do I poor bookworm know?) —
wonders of lascivious couture
up which I rise, wishing
Herrick-like I were the tendrils
and the flowers printed there.
Her thighs, praise God, curve just in time
to cup the softest peach of a derrière
which rounds again into a waist
two ardent hands could loop a hoop around
with fingers meeting,
drenched by the glissando
of her midnight operatic hair.
Now as she turns a corner
and grim eternity sets in between us
(I’ll never, never see her face),
my eyes leap free into the air she left —
More luck!
There hulks and bulks Mont Blanc,
his arms around his hulky-bulky juniors,
and not a cloud this late September
to cap their skulls,
no care but sun and snow and snapshots,
gliders, eagles and téléfériques.
What ardors and what squeezings
Went to make such altitudes!
Don’t, old worthy lord and mighty tub,
don’t go the way the last world empire went
when I return next year to look.
A noise of waking doors and rush of rising shutters
bring Commerce smiling into Chamonix.
Welcome, beaming shops!
Their baubles wink at me
like Antwerp’s hookers grinning through their windows.
My purse goes twitching for a trinket.
Paradise, I say,
will keep a corner warm for tinsel.
Nearby, the young green Arve slides under bridges,
all foam and adolescent vehemence,
to wed some aged portly river
in the humdrum plain below;
but there, too high for where my tourist’s eye can go,
such luck!
high in cold moss, down breathless rock
it sings itself forever into birth.
There’s my hotel, sitting at the curb
like a prim brick governess,
and leashed to her my bulldog of a car,
fed last night, pumped up for Italy,
and all but barking, “Off, man, off, why wait?”
Why wait?
The conifers are humming
slope on slope
a windy need of me.
fortunes of morning air!
More, more before I go, and must,
into the hot mouth of the south.
[In spite of its name, a petit crème is a large cup of coffee and milk. Trottoir means sidewalk. The reference to Herrick is owing especially to “The Vine”: “I dreamed this mortal part of mine / Was metamorphosed to a vine, / Which crawling one and every way / Enthralled my dainty Lucia”, etc. I enjoyed a view of several prostitutes of Antwerp plying their profession in a house across the narrow street from my oddly named dockside Hotel Antigone. The Arve flows, I believe, into the Rhône at Geneva.]