Ah, mon ami, won’t you come over to this bench of agony? How it hurts your back, but what a beautiful pain it is. Cigarette? Très bien. I can see from your outfit that you’re a plumber. Me, I toil in a similar vineyard—you may not realize it, but we both ensure that bad stuff goes down and what rises is as clear and pure as spring rain.
Mon frère, allow this humble poet to tell you a story. Allow me to take you to Montreal in 1964 when I moved like a Semitic apparition through jazz clubs and cafes, staying long enough to be espied but not so long that my absence would disrupt the fragile meditations of the assembled spirits. One evening, drunk on cheap wine, two women followed me to my tiny dwelling, my cramped and unfortunate cold-water flat. What they sought was shelter, in the Old Testament meaning of the word. I said to these twin angels, these impossible creatures of the night, “Girls, if you do not mind the faucet’s mythological drip into the destroying porcelain sink, my home is yours.”
Ah, the love we made that night! They pursued, and I was coy—I was coy, and they pursued. The love burned long, but of course, in the end, all that is left is ash. Comme l’oiseau sur la branche, comme l’ivrogne dans le choeur de la nuit, j’ai cherche ma liberte. How rusty my French sounds—I can get by, but it’s not a tongue I could ever move around in in a way that would satisfy the appetites of the mind or the heart. Oh, the heart.
Goodness, how low hangs the sun. Mon ami, I bid your farewell. I don’t know when I’ll be back.
