Verlaine’s wife glimpsed naked
in the reconciling light of the wagon-lit.
He coughed a dandy’s worth of ash
over his own lilac sleeve.
Shoulder to fleet shoulder with Beauty,
close enough to choke on her perfume
and be dazzled by the inches-away trash
of her diamond-studded hairclip.
At the turnstile she went past like a ghost
and he behind with a ticket-fumble
as the uniforms rose up and Beauty
was lost in the crowd.
All that month of searching,
as hope turned to stub and wrinkle.
***
In those dreams of snow why was one never naked?
The mind was as segregated as a mosque.
Back from the thin country,
a failed campaign of love.
Like a widow’s estate,
reduced to isolation and ruin,
passed by with a glance of insolent pity.
No end to the rich codes,
the moonlit, candle-snuffed slang,
with its ‘dead sisters’ the signifier for sperm,
shot off in generous loss.
***
Littre had provided pioupiou,
‘soldat du centre dans l’infanterie’,
and the leap was facile and erotic,
imagining flesh in fancy dress,
the lunging tip of the column,
battering the grim wall of resistance,
then breaking through,
enclosed within a squirm of giddy surrender,
fancy dress with a face like death,
blood-spattered from crown to boot.
***
Olivier, the most famous paladin.
And the castaway of his beloved Roland,
left behind to blow his brains out
on a shifting crimson hill of limbless Moors.
The mountains were snow-smothered,
an avalanche slipping in the light of a glittering sun,
a single white hair shawled with motes.
***
Sneaking out of Charleville to dream
of a Persia much simplified.
Blue pilasters, thick marble to hold up heaven,
or that immense cathedral built new each night,
which vanished each new morning.
The sting of cigarette smoke where the wind roared round the tunnel’s O.
***
He was an etymological guerrilla,
delving the antique shadows,
impresario of the variant third.
Hoping to make each newly-encountered language
a docile loving mistress,
whipping impoverished sounds to a rich frenzy.
And quickly then, Les Vilains Bonhommes.
The crème fraiche of rose-vested Parnassians, dedicated to the enjoyment of each other’s company one night each month. To exchange opinions and to contraverse, to read and listen to each other’s poems, and to drink to happy, permissible excess. At each encounter there were some thirty or so, which means that someone was keeping count. Their name, of which they were fiercely proud, was the appropriation of an intended insult addressed to them from beneath his livid umbrella by the theater critic whose name was prime pork for mockery, Victor Cochinot, at the premier of Francois Coppee’s Le Passant (pale young thing with heavy hair, requiring the actress to cough, incessantly, demurely). Among the regulars of the VB could be found Paul Verlaine
Leon Valade
Albert Merat
Emile Blemont
Etienne Carjat (photographer)
the Cros brothers
Pierre Elzear
Camille Pelletan
Jean Aicard
Fantin-Latour (painter)
Edmond Maitre
Brocquemont (engraver, classicist, pornographer)
Andre Gill (caricaturist)
Felix Regamey (forever third-legged as “ami de Gil”)
Charles de Sivry (composer and PV’s brother-in-law)
Michel de l’Hay (painter)
Jules Troubat
and sometimes Theodore Banville, to whom all deferred as maitre, cher or otherwise. Prior to the war, the siege, the events of the Commune, the meetings of the VB had taken place at the Hotel Camoens, on the Rue Cassette, later at the Mille-Colonnes, corner of Rue Montpensier. In the autumn of 1871 they took to gathering in the apartments of Ferdinand Denogeant, on the renovated, blood-washed Left Bank, corner of Rue Bonaparte and Place Saint-Sulpice.
***
His own attendance was noted on two specific occasions. The first, at which he was metaphorically and gloriously enthroned upon a billow of cigar smoke, applauded by the others following his reading of Le Bateau Ivre. And the second, at which he threatened Carjat with Verlaine’s sword-cane, reducing the photographer to a puddle of tears and urine. His invitation was permanently rescinded and Verlaine launched upon his sub-career as third-party apologist, inventing as he went. Valade’s epistolary description: Huge hands, huge feet, body still that of a child of thirteen or so, with deep blue eyes, a demeanor more savage than timid, this is the urchin whose imagination, full of incredible power and corruption, both fascinated and terrified myself and my friends. Imagine Jesus in the temple with the priests and doctors, only substitute JC with The Devil.
***
There must have been times when he threatened violence, and certainly he found himself at the receiving end of it (those rumors from the lock-up at the Prefecture), the narrow squalid night-time streets, the blind-drunk staggers from one shadow-island to the next. But the incident with the sword-cane, raised, flailed, above Etienne Carjat’s shocked face, this appears to be the sole instance when he came near to physically harming anyone.
Heredia’s daughter said he brought out the worst in others.
***
Laryngitis ruled the day,
and those driven indoors
sought glory in writer’s cramp.
There was enough spilled ink
to cover the horses’ hooves
as the pamphlet wars raved and raged.
Wet-nurses at their gossip,
joking about baby so-and-so’s
hyperbolic quequette.
Beauty, churlish and slender,
clicked by as if on stilts.
Rose of the World,
Pinkie, Angelique and Marie-Ange,
twin-mouthed and irreduceable.
Each ribbon, stem, and sash,
each lash, chain, and gloss
designed to remind the coined
whisker-twirlers of something
they had not yet tasted.
***
Every cult burned its favorite incense. Sandalwood, spearmint, attar of roses, macanudo, huile de cerises.
Adulation or flattery, the more words failed the heavier the smoke.
Science at last kept pace with Art, and not to be outdone, quackery kept pace in its clubfooted turn. For every invention patented and applied, how many thousands gathering dust, stillborn lunacies in their lovingly handmade boxes. The philosophers of sex peeled off across the imaginary auditorium, each with his or her prescriptions and phobias, the plus ca change of a calendrical striptease. The four-volume edition of 1869, illustrated with easy-to-follow erotic diagrams, the author’s name having undergone italianisation between reprints, from Venette to Venetti, the better to appear exotic and, by prejudiced extension, sulfurous. In the conjugal boudoir, the doctor purred, miserliness of new experience leads to ancient misery. Sales shot up.
***
And among the same suave collectors of mistresses, the loaning out of copies of the Petite bibliotheque de la curiosite erotique et galante, soft blue covers, an imprint of Lesbos (i.e. Brussels), and the lavender titles, to whet, to barely twinkle, to offer out like sweets to a child with toothache: Anandria, or, Confessions of Miss Sappho, Hearts and Hard-Ons, Gamiani, or, Two Nights Well Spent, the last by Elizabeth Moreton de Chabrillan, better known as Celeste Mogador, with anonymous preface (de Musset, isn’t it?), and plates by Felicien Rops, so that even the illiterate might gaze and swell.
***
Bizarre as a mannequin
stripped down to its sexless dowels,
ganged by rodents and dreamers alike.
Something not quite ramrod,
nor even properly bent under
Ganymede’s flu-flu-fluttery banner.
A drip of heresy, bullied to a wine-like flow.
***
Something shouted in the street
two weeks previous
would come back to haunt him.
So how to be strong
(the flexibility of the Cirque’s
pony-riding girls was not his style)
when fame unearthed some
village-bound cry of revolt,
spluttered in frustrated half-jest.
Poet of disorder.
***
Choose the unloaded echo of the word.
A setting of mignonnes,
aired in a white room,
with carnations and claustrophobic greenery,
playing cards a la Chardin.
Let the other echo resonate its fade,
less upon less, the closed room
of girls and boys held in reserve
for the midnight debauches of a royal monster.
Energy released in a jaundiced puff.
The strideur of the corralled swan,
the free spill of tomcats loquacious with heartbreak.
No need to look further than the
long-haired paramour with his arm in a sling.
What he had said came true.
And look elsewhere for a messiah.