On the métro
by the clusters of crooked feet, by the pole mottled with hands and running with light, the woman shuts her heavy eyelids, pale brows sloping like the sides of mountains tracking towards the landscape of a face that has hurt too many times, too many winters, falls with furrows plowed too deep. The métro hisses, jolts. Her hair lifts in the breeze like butterfly wings, the ends tattered and grey. She cannot hold her self aloft ! I watch her sway and leave.
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Les montagnes s’étalent dans des horizons foncés, hérissés,
là-dessous des forêts et la peau verte des pâturages. Elles rêvent des rêves bleus. Elles grouillent avec des champignons écrasés, des fleurs variées, des feuilles bien vertes poussant de la chlorophylle aux veines épuisées par l’été ; ses orages, ses caprices. Les falaises soupirent : des avalanches. Le ciel descend du bleu au bleu. La pierre, la terre se mêlent, s’embrassent avec froideur. Voici la pluie vient pour frotter les sommets nus, pour peigner les tresses sombres des arbres. À chaque flanc tombent des ombres. Les montagnes deviennent les ténèbres du soleil. Notes: make it blue
make animals with long ears and legs fantastic writing is art make things when you don’t have to I am learning anatomy at the Louvre: empty eyes, those broad Greek chests, hardness and roundness between the oval thighs. I watch the statues. They always seem to hold themselves, even those without arms. Legs lean together, shoulders slope, collars cradle little hollows beneath the pointed chins. Ringlet hair trails, proprietary, down necks and pelvises. I am learning how delicately fingers can hold fruit for centuries, how loosely bodies can wear flesh. I stare at their broken noses, parted lips, I rub the marble skin of my neck, think: human beings cannot last this long. My mother has told me
the story of the three pairs of shoes, lapti, that hang on our wall. Little things, woven from tree bark and deft hands, brought to a cold market square in Russia. Light, firm, meant to protect a child’s felt boots and numb toes, yet made almost achingly delicate by the years that lay between, when the poor old man peddled his shoes on the winter streets of Moscow. Thin and amber, strips of bark. My mother has told me how he beamed, lined face happy, when she bought them, life and streets and half a world away, when she bought them then and made an old man smile. |
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