Beloved Sunday, the soul’s respite...
The shutters have come down on cafés and boulangeries.The bellowing traffic is muffled and thinned.
Empty chairs around the fountain in the park.
The waiter almost smiles.
I find a stone bench by the Seine and watch the barges pass by.
It’s not my actions I remember most, it’s my inactions; the not-done is my gift to the world.I am everything that I have not performed.
Can’t you see that everything has changed- and nothing? All your life you have been fooled by appearances.All your life has been ruled by fear.
In the terrace gardens of the Cluny Museum, the Unicorn Forest rustles with poems and quests; the Lower Mysteries of Paris are everywhere around you, once you start to see.
In the flea market at Clignancourt I look into an antique gilded mirror:could that be the face of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, strutting the opulent corridors of Versailles(where the rulers of the world would crouch anywhere they pleased for a shit)? No, rather a peasant, a potato-eater.A Gaul.
I like to spend Sundays with the dead.Their conversation is most congenial to me.Prowling the streets of Pere-Lachaise,with a map of the netherworld,I seek out the mentors in my head.
The artificial river beaches ripple in the heat, Disney oases of palm trees and sand. The day slowly evolves like a game of pétanque.
Then, one morning, the cafe opposite is open again. The shutters are up everywhere. Workers are hurrying along, grabbing something to eat.
No time, no time.
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