Empty House
The Parisienne within
sits gracefully bent at a small cafe not
three blocks from the Louvre.
The square is an old negative, each color
quenched in its reverse, as she sighs,
regards the croissant moon, a dangling puff pastry
pinned to a papier-mache sky some
rabid surrealist has daubed flat black, faintly
tinted by the violet blood of stars. She waits here
for her assignation: l'etranger dangereux
encountered by chance on le Metro. She savors again
the fragrance of strong dark tobacco
caught in his hair as they swayed far too close.
She waits many hours since her house is empty and
waiting seems better than that.
'And what is an empty house,' she muses
over her fifth vin de pays, 'but a cupped palm
dripping the bright constant stigmata of
your own imperfections?' No amount of pancakes can
fill its hollow stomach. No birds will nest in
its unkindled chimney. There is only dust white
as milk, silence and dead flowers,
a dog that barks a heartbeat somewhere in the distance,
abandoned without music like the deserted cafe
the Parisienne has just left.
As the rackety clap of her stilettos
fades around the corner,
a tall shadow drifts over her table,
but there's only a thin thread of ghost-smoke
twining up from a stubbed-out Gauloise.
March 2024
posted for
WOW! This poem was worth the wait! My heart leaped when I saw you had posted, and every line of this poem is absolutely incredible. It is wonderful to read you again, Joy.
ReplyDeleteThe beginnings of a film noir or a French gothic --- the scene set so cinematically, the character drawn so brutally yet poignantly, the shadow of a desire almost fulfilled. You packed quite a punch with this one, Joy. I loved it.
ReplyDeleteWonderful!! What images!! I especially love the reflections on empty houses. So apt. And throughout such delicate use of the prompt words. Really beautiful!
ReplyDeleteAh, what a pleasure to have a Hedgewitch poem to read first thing in the morning! It's been far too long and makes my stony heart glad. Your poem has such a deftly drawn atmosphere and bittersweet ending. Now I have a fragment of an old song that I can't identify echoing in my head ("but I missed you there...") The entire piece is very dreamlike and surreal, and yet the emotions--some of them as bleak as they are--are starkly vivid and real. The inner landscape here is much more "there" than the outer. The cafe seems almost to shimmer and barely hold its place in reality. I loved how you bent "crescent" moon to "croissant" moon, dangling in the black sky. I liked the element of chance, of meeting someone accidentally on the Metro, but in your poem, even this danger and blessing ultimately fails to land, and seemingly only by moments. Finally, your use of the occasional Francais was very pleasing. This poem works like a Swiss watch in every element, Joy.
ReplyDeleteOooh! Mysterieux!! First this - "each color
ReplyDeletequenched in its reverse" wonderful. And now... The crime! Au seceurs! Can we save our Parisenne? Good woman, watch out!
This is one delicious poem Joy! As mysterious and lovely as a noir novel! I especially love the croissant moon.
ReplyDeleteWhatever the poet's intention, I read it as a frame from a return - roused enough to try again if only because whatever haunts from without isn't as spectral as what daunts within. "The Parisienne within" sets a paramour-ing into motion like pulling it from a photo album, only it's a negative, "quenched in its reverse." (Perfect.) The "assignation" in my reading comes from the dream, where our living senses and life experience are employed to act out a two-million-year-old drama perpetually revisited in every next dreamer. Poetry is purest there, I think, and this wells rich and sustaining for next poems. Perhaps. May it be so for you friend, if that is what wishes to well and you sleep better for it. I sure hope so.
ReplyDeleteif only all forays from the house had this flavor, and timbre, and texture. the mood reminds me of the outside of a Hopper painting ~
ReplyDelete