Aardvark
"..Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue.
They got some hungry women there and they'll really make a mess out of you..."
~Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
What were you to me back then,
with your tumbled hair and tequila?
Even Dali had his aardvark, led uncomplaining
through the dirty streets of Paris,
a glass-globe feast for insatiable eyes.
Impossible to know
what I was to you.
Your face was hinged,
a door at times standing open,
cracked to show the arid
arabesques of spiders
smiling in Poe's palace. Others
locked and bolted, bare and flash
as clean brass before it's engraved.
All I remember is you held me
like diamonds worked into your arms' ring
there in the tedium of the shelter
among the do-gooders and the riffraff.
The cardboard walls flexed with our love
but when I slipped the rhinestone lead
from your sleek throat
you ran
and the streets of Paris
emptied.
~August 2024
Process note: The photo of Dali shown actually is of he and his pet anteater. Poetic license.
posted for WG Word List at
Images: Dali takes his anteater for a stroll in Paris, 1969 Public Domain
The Smiling Spider, 1887, Odillon Redon, Louvre, Paris Public Domain
It is so wonderful to read you, Joy. This poem is amazing in so many ways. Wonderfully moving lines: "your face was hinged, a door at times standing open".....and the slipping off of the lead, the running, the streets emptying. Just wow.
ReplyDeleteFirst time through, I read this slowly as I always do with your work. But then I read it quickly and got something else out of it--some sense of dreamy, down at heel impermanence and confusion that befits the scene you create here. The hinged face is striking indeed, and the contrast between the glass globe Paris and the suddenly empty version; abrupt, like waking from a tumbling ride down the shaft of a weird imagining.
ReplyDeleteI read this as if it was a surreal dream trying to make sense. I too love the hinged face.
ReplyDeleteThe Dylan lead-in set the stage for the greatness that followed! Loved this, Joy.
ReplyDeletecertainly a fabulist atmosphere, one fraught with intrigue and scented with danger. hints of Verne or Shelley - you've hinged us a peek into an entire tilted world ~
ReplyDeleteWhat a Wonderfully constructed and thought provoking poem - really bought alive the senses and plunged the reader in another world
ReplyDeleteOooh! Oooh! Super great. And wow, maximum points for Dali and his aardvark, I'd forgotten that. Brilliant. But more I love the whole thesis, "What were you to me back then" and that exploration. "Your face was hinged" a perfect foil.
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