Status Updates From Paris in Our View: Poems Se...

A Third Thank-You Letter
Marie Ponsot

“[…]
The Seine and the sky refract each other's rain.

Unrefracting, I
lost June looking for you.

Every river needs an island
to underline its wetness with
that surge of green plume
every island needs.

And here, among the green where
the curve of the river ramparts retains
the river in stone, and the curves in pencil
retain the pulse of these words,
you are.”

Buttes-Chaumont
Robert Kelly

“[…]
If you call this love, so be it.
I call it walking across the park
on a mild winter day
worrying about the ducks
and not much else, I call it
lofty conversation with the soul,
eagles and poetry, no fear no hope,
we tread on things made to seem
like other things, this is sort of art,
we rise to easy summits and look round.”

Paris for Resident Aliens
Gaël Faye

“[…] Paris, rights declared universal
For all I resent that you're disdainful and haughty
Capital of Fashun with a taste for society
Let's constellate the real night you choose to ignore
Cease shining the thousand illuminations of your decor
Paris, I love you when the lights go out, my beauty
You can't write a poem for a city that's poetry...”

On Hedonism
Anne Carson

„Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want
to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my
legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as
peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.“

On Hedonism
Anne Carson

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

„The living come, murmuring with fresh flowers, their maps
fluttering like white flags in the slight breeze.
April. Beginning of spring. Lilies for Oscar,
one red rose for Colette. Remembrance. Do not forget.

[…] Proust, and Gertrude Stein
with nothing more to say. Below the breathing trees
a thousand lost talents dream into dust; decay
into largely familiar names for a stranger's bouquet.

Forever dead.“

Paris at Night
Jacques Prévert
Translated from the French by Krista Halverson

„Three matches lit one by one in the night
The first to see all of your face
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And darkness all around to remember all of this
As I hold you in my arms“

„I abandon myself to thoughts about the history of bread: how was the first grain of wheat discovered in a green ear braided like a pigtail? […] And how did it occur to him to grind it, knead it and bake it until he arrived at this miracle? […] The smell of fresh bread rises into the air and I look at my watch, then come back from thousands of years away to a life just beginning.“

„In 1946, before setting sail from New York to France, George Whitman wrote in his journal: "I long to bury myself in a really exciting city, a city where culture is vibrant, a city where music is passionately loved, and where love is something holy and beautiful — a city like Paris, where poetry is a part of life, where people are poets and life is a poem."“