It All Depends
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Et nos amours, faut-il quāil māen souvienne?
But it is not love that I would speak of
for as you see, I am of
the nineteenth century, when love was
. . . well, it all depends,
and I canāt get out of it,
whatever this love is.
I will die in it and I hope
of it, it is the preamble
to walking in and sitting
down and saying āHiā
before anything else has a chance
to happen. And then
of course nothing does,
which is why you keep saying itā
you canāt get out
of saying it. So you may as well
take off your hat and stay a while,
which is what you always planned on anyway.
The nineteenth century,
what a tremendous thing
to be in love in!
Cottages go by
and music piles up
like excited dead people.
They stop but donāt,
like sleeping people who are alive,
but itās not that easy,
the century is more complicated
than one had expected
now that everyone has a pot and a pan
but not a love of the pot and the pan.
Still, look at those sailing ships
on the wide main and the stairways
that spiral into heaven
and that bird with a long red beard
sticking straight up!
Itās our chance to separate ourselves
into numerous pieces and have them
go in different directions,
reassembling what time had dispersed
in the form of granules and mist.
Or was it even really there?
A nightingale warbled
the tune it was supposed to
so the world would calm down.
Thereās nothing wrong with resting
alongside this shady rill and taking medications
as if they were piles of stones placed at intervals
by people who must have had a meaning
in mind but with no thought of telling you
what it was, for they didnāt know that you
would exist. Therefore, lie down and rest.
The afternoon is mild and your love
is not driving you crazy, temporarily.
A rest might give you the strength
to look love straight in the eye
and not fade into granules and mist.
Reverdy said
āOne must try to liveāā
the statement of a man
who didnāt love
or wasnāt loved
enough. A small rectangle
of light lay on his floor
and his shoe
flashed as it went by.
His wife was hidden
in the kitchen, his girlfriend
hidden in celebrity,
his God just hidden.
Pierre opened the kitchen door,
the trap door of fame,
and the side of the cathedral,
but there was nothing there,
and when he opened his heart
he found only a rectangle
of sunlight on the floor.
But it was enough.
Perhaps his wife was hiding
her love in the kitchen,
the dark kitchen in Solesmes,
where I saw her walking
briskly down the street
at the age of 97 or 98,
the same street
a few years later
she would move slowly up
and down the way
to lie down in the tomb
next to Pierre, her Pierre.
By then the girlfriend
had twirled into Eternity,
and God had hidden so deeply
in Pierreās poems
Pierre didnāt know
He was thereā
He had gone back and disappeared
beneath the period
that ended Pierreās first book,
like a dark glint.
But God too was trying to live.
He hasnāt been around lately,
which is perhaps why
the landscape is so cheerfulā
it gets to be just itself,
brutally wonderfully so, and birds
veer and chirp and lift
their wings to see whatās there.
Itās air.
And so singing.
āBut thatās what I did,ā
says Pierre
out of nowhere.
āAnd you canāt tell
if the singing made the air
or the other way aroundā
or both, which is most likely.ā
And then, like a Frenchman,
he left, before I had a chance
to throw him around the room,
but with respect,
affection, and mountains,
the kind they had in the century
he was born in, mountains as black
as his tomb, which I am unable
to throw around now
that his wifeās in there too.
Henriette: her name.
(Henri: his real first name.)
(Her name a little feminine version of h...
