Page 38 - Poems

down a cleavage bearing the promise What happens
in Paris stays in Paris while Arc de Triomphe,
Louvre and Sacré Coeur turn cartwheels on a skirt.
So many drape our city over hearts and hips,
waists and arms and wrists — so many but we ourselves.

By Châtelet, the ripple swells into torrent.
Legions and legions of heels pound steel-tipped concrete
stairs to the platform, some sidestepping, some near trip-
ping on, an islet of quiet we’ll call Abdul
for the sake of custom: middle-aged, unshaven,
clad in any of five sets of clothes whichever
the season, plastic tumbler in hand for handouts.
Is he from Syria, Libya or Yemen?
I never dare ask, never dare to make him more
than barely motile statuary (Resistance,
Frailty, Memory, all at once) but for three years,
there he’s been, more constant than daylight overground,
as gentle, tired as the Buddha-cast at Louvre-
Rivoli, Malraux’s exemplar of Eastern Art.

Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre, now, devotes
more light and room to foreigners, mostly other-
worldly ones: enroute to the Carrousel, spirits –
gods, ancestors, beasts and herbs and blossoms, beings
from earth and heaven and the netherworld – beckon.
Huichol spirits – from distant Jalisco
in the mountains of Western Mexico – beckon
through shaman Santos de la Torre Santiago’s
colossal fresco, that bedazzling mosaïc
with eighty panels (and beads, a full two million)
for life and song and dance and death. Finest of quid
pro quo, this fresco, a swap with the Mexicans
for our own escutcheon: an art nouveau entrance
by Guimard to the metro in 1900.

More stations, more wonders, more spats, crowds and laughter
traverse town with the steel-wheeled rolling stock of Line
Seven before my terminus. Thought stills, after
day and night, cloud and rain, dusk and sunshine
vanish with the skyline. Thought stills; soon, so does time,
till alarm and iMessage both ping at Chaussée
d’Antin-La Fayette and the General’s large, grimed
finger overhead points at impending delay.

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