We play at degrees of being alive. Walking
along the Seine, past the Bibliothèque, a circus,
a wax museum. The ordinary is so freakish,
unsettling, impossible to ignore. Where to next?
A progress report. Immigrants waiting for a bus
opposite the starch works. A big moon spotlights
a giant’s anvil and hammer as it forges the
timeless instant at hand. A marrow of forms,
naked concrete, matière vivante, pieces of interior
after identical interior. Their stories enveloped us,
we were suffocated in them. Escaping down a
street under nightlights the world at a standstill,
twenty-four frames per second. A machine of
seizures, violent banalities, in which everything
is still unfolding, everything still in play. Few lives
have the aesthetic dimension of classical narratives.
Should we care? But we too become deaf to all
persuasion, like God in Racine’s laughable tragedy –
an anti-self who merely traverses and rates.
Looking for an explanation for what’s taking place:
a movement, a sound, a change of stance –
something simple we could understand, that
keeps the two terms of the contradiction together?
Fate, you say, is just as arbitrary as a name
or a shadow cast upon history as upon a wall.
Hoping like a cinema parvenu to be picked out
by the appropriate ending. We climb the
martyr’s hillside under drainpipes and fire escapes,
air thick as oatmeal and molasses. Then re-
descend, wet coats and boots in a bar above the quays.
It’s midnight, again. Wrapped in perishable words
we exchange dark resolutions. Also, it’s raining.
Desire and police keep vigil along rue Victor Cousin,
beneath the window Rimbaud masturbated from.