Paris lay open to receive him.
The police were busy as bees,
and working from lists, on which his name
was nowhere featured.
He had been invited and now he came,
and whether the sender of the invitation
had given more than a thought
to the consequences of his fraternal good manners,
the volumes of revisionist apologia
serve as a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.
Swoon, lie back as though on young Madame Verlaine’s divan,
settling into the golden kiss where two cushions
press each their silken lip to the other.
Wake into the future, having dreamed the legend into being.
***
The dead palaces, burned out
and galleried with blood,
poking from memory and into
autumn’s Parisian light,
black spaces bristled over
with planks and canvas tarp.
The back and forth of
who was to blame for the mass,
if merely season-long collapse in morale,
would occupy many a column
in the restored and ascendant journals
of the reactionary victors,
the clandestine broadsides of those few
surviving communards (the dream dies hard)
and the free association rags
which fed on sordid scraps,
all tits and twinkling morality.
***
There were already traces of green in the poet’s vomit,
which a less fastidious drunk might have remarked
as a souvenir of a too-hasty lunch.
Was it worth the dream of the smoke-boa’d Seine,
the buggerer’s shrub, the little teardrop lake
southeast of Tuileries?
As a consequence of such thirst they grew bitter,
and death, with the accent of Parnasse,
the pelvic thrust of Saint-Cyr, took them in its brotherly arms.
***
He drank a year’s worth in a dazzle of mad days,
the arid hills of late July and early August,
emerald silvering to the gathered scissors,
to girdle the appetite, to spur the furious weaving,
to embrutalize and call merry murder.
The nun with the bucket and rag was not outraged,
despite what her eyes said. Her straining shoulders
reminded him of a lover’s wings.
Closer in age to him than to the other,
and having glimpsed what he should not have.
***
Nausea at the sight of uniforms.
The press and whistle of tipped caps
and petted cuffs, epaulettes
neurotically dandruff-brushed.
Troops strolled this way and that,
their trousers tinted with a line of pressed ruby.
The sensual connoisseur could almost hope
to stroke such fabric to a stiff and chloral sheen.
Bespurred and on perpetual parade,
these yoles qui jam-jam-jamais.
Picked off and prised from the herd,
horns went blunt and eyes narrowed
with a human glint.
A question of honneur,
and everything, sober or drunk,
wound up as a question of honneur.
The image of the patriot was no longer
the bare-breasted milkmaid topping the barricades of ’48,
but a rouged waif flat on her back,
or stood up against an alley wall,
a moan of commerce in tattered black market stockings.
The white flow of the milky way
gratified both precision and smut.
Females whose attributes were visible and
prominent and numbering in the thousands,
in the octopus-legged galaxy of Paris:
lymphatic, chlorotic, malnourished,
and, to slake the desire for revenge,
an unusual richness of faux-blonds,
Brunhilde on her knees and efficient with
a soldier’s unbuttoning.
***
The acid eye took in more than the streets,
noting the soft hiss of folded bills like crows’ wings
above the hollow scrape of coins.
Houses of gold, their gardens reached through glass arcades.
Bankruptcy of flesh and air an easy price
for hours of such graduated pleasure.
A lily to caress the shining cheeks of pretty sinners.
And what did the poet say about the ready-to-wear
kingdom of blossoms, rotting in dark foyers,
a perfume to sweeten the abattoir?
***
The oldest of the old, meaning Napoleon’s seven-footers.
White-haired and stooped, but cloudy eyes
which cleared from time to time
and sparked like a carnival shadow-box,
the red blooms of Jena, the crystal fireworks of Moscow,
the mown down poppies of Quatre Bras.
Among men in easy conversation,
the ways, means, and number of each remembered act,
stupra revisited and revised.
As soon as the moon scolded the pet fox,
new worlds would unfold, uncarpeting themselves
of their nude Cleopatras.
Imagining the once-proud killers,
staring in disappointed wonder
at the petit pots lucent with baby food,
set before them by black-vested wardens.
Provided a fry-up, a hot bath for their shaved dignity,
but paving stones cast aside by progress,
eyed by some would-be architect,
dreaming temple, hotel, or casino
on an empire’s debris.
***
Settle the blame on the chilly shoulders
of Catherine de Medici,
coaxing German cavaliers
to set up business in the bosom of her
borrowed country.
Their faces were familiar from the extras
crowding Durer’s woodcuts,
faces of a certain experience and,
away from snowy killing fields
and conspiratorial torchlight,
lined with an aspect of wary wisdom.
***
The lover, or detective, or even spiteful
sub-Parnassian, hidden in the hedges,
examining each of the building’s windows in turn.
Starting with the uppermost storey
and moving left to right and dropping and back
until ground-level corner then back again.
Something will reveal itself and something
always does, an exposure waiting
for the ambiguous skew.
Sunset wipes the slate clean,
the vitrage set alight with an explosion of red and gold.
The family of rejetons royal,
shuffling into well-fed, well-earned exile.
Thiers? And what of him?
Little seen, never forgiven.
The house was still there
and no one doubted this.
Merely that it was so effectively obscured
by a mob of golden leaves.
***
Under the shadow of that minor Notre Dame.
The phenomenon of les lorettes,
like new coins shivering from the
steam bath of the mint.
Flocks of them, and practical at their trade,
no tarnish yet to dent the brilliance.
The grisette, the kept woman,
and now these sublime entrepreneurs
offering instant passage.
Popular for a spell,
a spray of artificial flowers,
calling sweetly from a suburban window sill.