The Shadow at Cabourg

1

Once dusk has dimmed

this could be a film studio

At the foot of a long parallelepiped

bearing the legend Grand Hotel

an assortment of scenery: children’s day camps, beach bars

a patch of parasols

their blue-striped petals folded around their stems

the back of a row of villas

And the sea, eternal bit player

who comes, gray cat, in search of her kittens

abandoned on the sand this afternoon

The other extras have left: the boy the grandmother

the chauffeur the baron the lift-boys the cook

The director is already searching out new locations

looking for other characters

A few streaks of light persist west of the Ouistreham coast

On the horizon line two worlds exchange

transparence and density

Will Shadow take substance?

One can almost hear it, courteous but categorical

No need to wait for an apparition

The book is enough. In any case

the Shadow is too busy tracing the memory

of an (already full) existence lost to the sky

2

On the playing field around the low building

which protects the gleaming object of their dreams

the firemen hardly play

They are more inclined to enjoy the cool air

near the half-burnt half-car carcasses

(For their exercises, they say)

Inhale the breeze talking of fires

which (always violent) winds stir up

in the (always dry) Midi

the Shadow is foreign to them, a creature

not of fire but water, Venice or Elstir,

of earth and even of air

bearer of airships although an intimate enemy

In bright pink tights, in a corner of the field

little she-devils laugh into their sleeves, stick out

fleshy tongues as pointed as flames

3

Not part of the sightseers’ route, this garden is not visited

beyond the hippodrome and the golf course

mosaic of allotments distributed post-war

to the natives

proletarian treeless terrain in this country of orchards

with narrow sandy paths between narrow kitchen gardens

The garden has been “reimagined” according to new standards

The shacks replaced by uniform toolsheds

The invasive flowers cut back

An old patch of hollyhocks annihilated

along with other usurping plants,

gladiolas dahlias marigolds and sweet william

the Shadow would never have ventured here

but for those who pursue its traveler’s dreams

and those of its beloved Baudelaire

the flora has encouraged gold-bellied squash

elegant artichokes perched on high heels

blue-green cabbages the color of eyes and oceans

4

At the instant of blindness

Will you clutch at the blue grass

which tickled you with its bayonet blades

on a day of pale sunlight when the gulls

Turned together toward the sea

seemed to group themselves even closer together

on a vaster and vaster island

With neither trees nor hedges for a screen

Or will you follow docilely

the flowing of the world into the mirror

annulled by a blacker and blacker sky

But held to the ground by human lights

The Shadow would answer that death tastes like a cake

enhanced by the tea infusing it

according to memory’s fixed rules

5

Despite its resemblance to an amphitheater

(the most recent dead on the highest benches)

the cemetery remains protected from the crowd

near invisible at the end of a sunken lane

Not maritime, on every side it overlooks

an eternal wood-green sea

How breathe in death there when a breeze walks

the odors and the lights of August

Although civilian, wars’ chances mingle there

the Christian, Arab and Jewish names of 1914’s soldiers

(evacuated well to the rear, it seems)

with Commonwealth airmen’s, shot down in ’45

At the center, on a proscenium, stelae

fanning out below sculpted coats of arms

act as the chorus of a noble

but not feudal lineage. Has a visitor seen there

an avatar of some ideal aristocrat?

His shadow swallows the cemetery

swallows the body of the present visitor,

held for an instant in the instant’s absolute

6

Japonaiserie, Whistleriana

the acacias hold on high

the pale pink flesh of their blooms

Propitiatory offering to the storm-god

Homage to lost pine trees, you would like

to think, you for whom forgetfulness

has not blotted out the former landscape,

Saying to yourself that in these times

when the crowd has wrenched the town

from its vocation of ennobled fisherwoman

behind the fan of a beach

The Shadow itself would not lift

its eyelids, trampled to translucence

by an absence of dreams.