Petits Poèmes en Prose
Colaba - Clignancourt - La Vie En Rose - Black Coffee - Fleuve National - Life in the Provinces
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Colaba (Mumbai)
I walk along the potholes of a cratered moon, down the dark alley where sleepers crouch among the garbage, and where the debris of stories up is thrown down. So often, returning late at night like this, I’ve seen rats scurry from the corner of my heart. I’ve seen their hunchback figures blur into the dark crevices which are their homes. But this evening I see the familiar shape stock still, in the middle of the lane. Under the bright moon I match its stance, and watch it move slowly, so unlike other nights. As in a trance, with tentative steps, and sniffs of unknown emotions, I watch it, stepping gingerly onto the flattened body of my shadow. I turn, slip under the partially closed grill, and follow the hard metal of the circular road, as the moonlight becomes dimmer, each creak I step, each crack a tale, each thought a squeak, each gleam a blinding light.
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À la Porte de Clignancourt
(After Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam”)
One of the great joys in life is to watch a girl walk into the light from inside some dingy bar,
and to see her white ankles sing while the sailors coming into the port sniff the air
and imagine green mermaids wandering the streets.
At night the bar is full of gold-diggers and girls who no longer sport tails,
with eyes like whirlpools and lashes like ropes in the storm
that the sailors remember dimly from their collective dream of being ship-wrecked
on a floating island in a stream and being eaten by pretty cannibals
and completely forlorn.
The dream turns to mist, until the accordion stirs the wind in the sails
and the sailors rise from their codswept tables
and cast their nets across the planks of the dance floor shimmering with mermaids
who feared that because the seas were full of danger there were no pirates anymore.
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Black Coffee
(From Rue de Poteau to Boulevard Ornano)
I feel like a coffee, a black coffee, with lots of sugar in it, so I walk southward up Rue de Poteau, past La Piscine, which serves mojitos strong as the Cuban tide of memories within me (for a minute I'm lost deep in green and sandy memories on the beach at Playa Ancón) but I shake myself and move onward, past Jules Joffrin and the Café du Nord, soon forgetting the guantanamera, and hum instead Dans le port d'Amsterdam y'a des marins qui dansent...
I continue on Rue Ordener till I reach Rue Ornano and open the doors of a café. The streets are noisy but the café is noisier, booming with the voices of Senegal and Gabon, descendants of those who weathered the tides of history, robbed by pirate ships from the ports along the Gold Coast and Zanzibar to be reborn in the markets of Cairo and New Orleans, the galley ships and the caravans of the Western and Eastern trades come back to me through the seaweed of my pirate past, and I find myself dreaming of the majestic Nubian on board stretching her dark arms to the jungle sky, and ask the waiter, timidly, so quietly that he can barely hear me, if they have cane sugar.
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Fleuve National
(From Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to Place de la République)
the streets flow like streams, combine into rivers, downhill from the pagoda high on Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, down Rue de la Villette, splashing into the Vietnamese shops on Rue de Belleville, funnelling southwest past Edith Piaf singing in the doorway about Ménilmontant and la belle France of yesteryear, her voice lost in the gurgling of cars racing downward toward the parting of histories, the liquid traffic flowing left and right to the Mekong and Niger, straight through the intersection past the fall of Tangiers and Dien Bien Phu, scarf-bannings and burning cars, squeezing, chopsticks scattered over a bronze Maghreb table, into the heady currents of Place de la République
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Life in the Provinces
(Place des Augustins, Aix-en-Provence)
It was as if they'd travelled overland from the centre of the world to an outpost fringed with barbarism. It was as if they were from Athens or Rome and they'd come to shed some light in a faraway colony in a dark corner of the Earth but all they found were people who had no idea who they were.
One could see it in their wide open eyes, with their seal-brown irises, soft like the eyes of pansies, and in the wonderfully forbidden yet not completely hidden way Meilin slid her slim fingers underneath the hand that dangled so closely, almost asking to be taken as they walked across Place des Augustins in this alien land, oceans from Suzhou.
It was as if she was asking to be embraced, if not by this new land then by the one who shared her estrangement from it, after they walked up Rue Espiarat to their rented apartment, almost asking for that soft hand to caress her golden shoulders and slide the white cotton strap downward, letting the dress fall next to the books barely opened.
Neither had found much company to keep with them, although the brochures had painted a very different picture of the famous Alliance Française in Aix-en-Provence where this fad of a language had recently sprouted with its Chanel and its Jean-Sol Partre and its unpronounceable Rs, as if it were a French Concession blessing the mortal beings of this Earth with an angelic tongue, except that they were stuck in a classroom while the thin Provençal sun rose without a word, budding in the early Spring.
Meilin thought of wild cherry blossoms and fragrant melon-seed tea as she watched the hard Northerners drinking cup after cup of strong coffee in their Patagonian jackets, grimacing bar-room smiles at them, as if they were common labourers bathing in salt water on the shores of Aberdeen.
They reminded her of marauding Huns and she wondered why the French hadn’t built a wall to stop the northern giants with their guttural sounds from descending into the cafés and southern valleys of lavender.
On the street she squeezed the hand beside her as she thought about the morning spent sitting in rows, two wooden statues with indecipherable smiles, living up to the stereotype. Even during the breaks they could barely talk to their neighbours who kept shouting things in English and German, stupid things about Guinness and a girl called Miley.
She squeezed Chunhua's fingers tighter, almost begging to touch her lips, those lips she'd been watching trying to master the long u sound and the incomprehensible articles: le, la, les. For the past two weeks she'd watched closely from the corner of her eye as Chunhua mangled the French language with those soft lips, painted with an almost translucent lacquer, Pêche Originale, that they bought at a nearby cosmetics shop, Essence de Provence.
As she stood on the cobbled street, key in hand, she heard herself say, Chunhua, monte. As Meilin said Oui, she saw her soft pink tongue, the soft lips that she lacquered every morning with what she called Péché Provençal.
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