Thursday, August 25, 2005

A traffic circle outside Paris

Bethesda then, the girl who knows

Pi to forty places falls asleep,

and as she does she fingers the gold

flake, the gold key, and when she

wakes up everyone loves her. It is

4 AM in Paris. Local time. The news

from the world comes in however...

creosote, lipo, whatever it is that

they are advertising between songs.

Someone gets surgery but they

don't say where. She should visit her

aunt in Spain? Love a bullfighter?

She gets it all down in her notepad

somehow. Until the drama is already

breaking up, already fading, there's

la Tour Eiffel, les Champs-Elysées,

Notre-Dame, le Louvre... Oh it feels

like coming home, the trains run so late.

And from there the entire face

swells, and the split between her left

incision and the right is a little

sore; her gums start to bleed. She

takes the pill they gave her for this.

If she was ever in a dark room...

If she was ever getting there by a

dark man... Oh, that's what she

forgot to say... the local story like an

audition... No he doesn't light up like a

lamppost... No he doesn't have five

seconds... moving too far behind her the

limbs for real now... No he doesn't

disappear when she closes her teeth.

She forgets the language of heaven

but she remembers the algebra.

The whole body turns in on itself,

turns, and especially the eyes.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I love this poem. I am adding it to my collection for "best of". I wonder if we could get a girl to read it with a french accent.

didi

AnnMarie Eldon said...

it would be fabulous to have a good French translation of this

but fabulous anyway

David said...

hey, thanks.

didi, i like the idea of a french woman reading this, oh yes. hope your power comes back soon.

hannah, that is a good poem. i don't have any Donald Hall but i have read that one somewhere; it is really fine.

annmarie, hmmm. i wonder who would be able to do it...

Unknown said...

I love this too. Nice work.

Lee Herrick said...

Very nice poem here, David. I enjoyed it a lot.

David said...

lee, jenni, thank you