So how would you translate “Dommage”?
The town is closed, remorselessly.
Only the tourists arrive. Erroneously migrating birds
Landing on a mirage,
They go to roost among gargoyles
Because the quays refuse
To open up their mouldering lids
For these illiterate hordes.
x
And yet there is a poetry to closure.
The flaneur goes on the scavenge for
Retreating paradigms of being away while summer’s here:
The dried leaves that loiter by the roots
Of planes inured to eczema,
The nuclear family groups
Hinting at abusive subterfugesx
Back in mid-Western suburbia.
x
Aren’t the daughter’s hot-pants far
Too brief for her to sit like that on her father?
Aren’t the son’s cascading curls
Pre-Raphaelite? How faraway the mother.
Idlers eye what these can’t camouflage.
They constitute the sights
Now, while the town is dead, removed, away,
All its shops on holiday.
x
Diamond anniversaries go by,
Hand in withered hand, on their way
To Burger King, out-burghering Rodin.
Still, Parisian sphinxes spout
The lie that the town is alive
Or just about to wake up.
Mouths of granite spew this out,
Their rhapsody absurd.
x
Anciently in Vogue,
Audrey Hepburn gets the final word.
“Make-up can only
Make you look pretty on the outside,
But it won’t help
If you’re ugly on the inside,
Unless you swallow the make-up.”
x
Paris, August, 2018