Walking in Paris

Lyrics

I come back to your youth, my Nana, as if I might clean off the mad woman you became, withered and constipated, howling into your own earphone. I come, in middle age, to find you at twenty in high hair and long Victorian skirts trudging shanks' mare fifteen miles a day in Paris because you could not afford a carriage. I have walked sixteen miles today. I have kept up. I read your Paris letters of 1890. Each night I take them to my thin bed and learn them as an actress learns her lines. "Dear homefolks" you wrote, not knowing I would be your last home, not knowing that I'd peel your life back to its start. What is so rеal as walking your streets! I too have the sore toе you tend with cotton. In Paris 1890 was yesterday and 1940 never happened --- the soiled uniform of the Nazi has been unravelled and reknit and resold. To be occupied or conquered is nothing --- to remain is all! Having come this far I will go farther. You are my history (that stealer of children) and I have entered you. I have deserted my husband and my children, the Negro issue, the late news and the hot baths. My room in Paris, no more than a cell, is crammed with 58 lbs. of books. They are all that is American and forgotten. I read your letters instead, putting your words into my life. Come, old woman, we will be sisters! We will price the menus in the small cafes, count francs, observe the tower where Marie Antoinette awaited her beheading, kneel by the rose window of Notre Dame, and let cloudy weather bear is home early to huddle by the weak stove in Madame's kitchen. We will set out tomorrow in stout shoes to buy a fur muff for our blue fingers. I take your arms boldly, each day a new excursion. Come, my sister, we are two virgins, our lives once more perfected and unused.