(i)
He owns a suit as gray
as winter dawnlight on the Seine,
and also owns (or does he rent?)
a penguin’s coat,
which like a bridal gown,
is stamped ‘Performance Only.’
But twenty years from now,
when memory twins the name
Alain Lombard
with hothouse Carmen’s spitfire tease,
neither suit nor tux
will be the best-remembered frame.
His ursine torso clothed
in baby blue;
a royalty’s loyalty of blue;
a shirt the size of a picnic blanket,
at an intimate
dejeuner pour deux.
Monsieur Lombard is faithful
to his chosen hue,
fancies himself (perhaps)
orchestral King
of the one-note
Gallic Blues?
(ii)
Jour après jour et nuit après nuit
Parisian blue counts down an exile’s beat.
A shirt invested with a privacy so pure
that gossipy speculation is de rigueur.
Untouched by soap and soiled stiff,
is its sphinxlike statement one of style?
And yes, the oh-so-public disdain
of sartorial option is in itself a statement
of style.
If dogs go daily
in the uniform of the night before,
than why not he?
Baton buried bonelike,
to be pawed up fresh before each curtain’s rise?
As perfect as nature and therefore free
to sneer away the claims of vanity?
So thumb’s down to a change of color,
thumb’s down to a change of cut,
for as the threads thin out to nothing
each new button gleams with future loss
until the tired needle hums
its wee oiseau-like tune:
Ne bouge pas, mon amour,
Je suis content ici …
And so a second guess:
that he surrenders to the familiar,
to the warm embrace of simplest simple comfort.
(One thinks of Marlon and his seashore mumus,
or Orson, housed in a cardinal’s gargantuan robes,
red as Sangria and bursting at the seams.)
But no, it’s neither style nor comfort
plucks the mysterious pearl
free of the oyster’s luscious clutch
nor cracks the riddle’s continental clue
that is Alain’s wearing of the blue.
(iii) (a sleepy interlude & slightly out of tune)
A flash of schoolboy’s French is what this sarabande requires!
And so I’ll paraphrase Lord Byron,
whose French ran narrow and thin,
from gutter to brothel and back again.
-j’ai peur de la sensualite
des anges,
avec leurs levres d’or,
leurs langues d’argent,
ces yeux inhumain,
chatoyant de la promesse
d’extase eternal!
One might mistake him here for Berlioz,
whose own obsessions with sex and danger
were an easy rival, and so unlike those of Bizet,
whose twilight desires pricked most swollen
on the finer points of royalties and discounts.
Still, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,
at best a stage-prop, like a pair of plastic pistols,
a passion-crushing swan … and the name of Berlioz
contains that of Bizet (although the letter ‘t’
drifts like an amputated tail), and Carmen’s Daddy floats,
in an amniotic fluid two parts champagne,
a castanet-clicking Jonah
in the belly of a fantastic Faustian whale.
Which brings us by circuitous scam
round to the touchstone of La Belle France,
which rhymes (in harsh American)
with trance
and glance
and underpants …
(iv)
What is it Melisande cries out
to Pelleas’ groan that he’s drowning
in a showerfall of stars?
One half-imagines her spread sweetly back
upon a therapist’s couch and moaning:
-Sur moi aussi!
sur moi aussi!
Alain broods at the podium,
patient as a sniper.
His index finger crooks
The triple-jointed air,
fiddling as the woodwinds
kiss and make up,
or squeezing off
a single fateful pulse
to coax the bass players
from their squabbles.
But when the dwellers of the pit
are lost in concentration,
when no one glances up
and he’s alone,
then do his fingers prance and tap
and trace the ghost of some faded stain
that wasn’t soup and wasn’t wine
though spilled with similar thirsty passion?
Is this the sexy difference
between ‘his’ and ‘hers’?
A boy’s chemise by day,
it moonlights as a girl’s bedtime shift,
though several sizes large enough
for lovers to get lost in.
This then the third and final guess.
He fills it much the same
as certain memories fill with music,
and hidden in its bluest folds
or stenciled on the generous
stretch which clings his paunch,
the clues no Poirot of the heart
could hope to miss.
He wears it out of
homely, human, horny, homesick
Love.