Your Paris

Lyrics

I wanted to humour you. When you stepped, in a shatter of exclamations, Out of the Hotel des Deux Continents Through frame after frame, Street after street, of Impressionist paintings, Under the chestnut shades of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein. I kept my Paris from you. My Paris Was only just not German. The capital Of the Occupation and old nightmare. I read each bullet scar in the Quai stonework With an eerie familiar feeling, And stared at the stricken, sunny exposure of pavement Beneath it. I had rehearsed Carefully, over and over, just those moments – Most of my life, it seemed. While you Called me Aristide Bruant and wanted To draw les toits, and your ecstasies ricocheted Off the walls patched and scabbed with posters – I heard the contrabasso counterpoint In my dog-nosed pondering analysis Of café chairs where the SS mannequins Had performed their tableaux vivants So recently the coffee was still bitter As acorns, and the waiters' eyes Clogged with dregs of betrayal, reprisal, hatred. I was not much ravished by the view of the roofs. My Paris was a post-war utility survivor, The stink of fear still hanging in the wardrobes, Collaborateurs barely out of their twenties, Every other face closed by the Camps Or the Maquis . I was a ghostwatcher. My perspectives were veiled by what rose Like methane from the reopened Mass grave of Verdun. For you all that Was the anecdotal aesthetic touch On Picasso's portrait Of Apollinaire , with its proleptic Marker for the bullet. And wherever Your eye lit, your immaculate palette, The thesaurus of your cries, Touched in its tints and textures. Your lingo Always like an emergency burn-off To protect you from spontaneous combustion Protected you And your Paris. It was diesel aflame To the dog in me. It scorched up Every scent and sensor. And it sealed The underground, your hide-out, That chamber, where you still hung waiting For your torturer To remember his amusement. Those walls, Raggy with posters, were your own flayed skin – Stretched on your stone god. What walked beside me was a flayed, One walking wound that the air Coming against kept in a fever, wincing To agonies. Your practiced lips Translated the spasms to what you excused As your gushy burblings – which I decoded Into a language, utterly new to me With conjectural, hopelessly wrong meanings – You gave me no hint how, at every corner, My fingers linked in yours, you expected The final fate-to-face revelation To grab your whole body. Your Paris Was a desk in a pension Where your letters Waited for him unopened. Was a labyrinth Where you still hurtled, scattering tears. Was a dream where you could not Wake or find the exit or The minotaur to put a blessed end To the torment. What searching miles Did you drag your pain That were for me plain paving, albeit Pecked by the odd, stray, historic bullet. The mere dog in me, happy to protect you From your agitation and your stone hours, Like a guide dog, loyal to correct your stumblings, Yawned and dozed and watched you calm yourself With your anaesthetic – your drawing, as by touch, Roofs, a traffic bollard, a bottle, me.