Paris, Sunday

I’ve always thought I lead a charmed life, pinching myself in Paris after growing up in remote Vancouver, city immortalised, well, by Apollinaire, for one, in his poem ‘Windows': ‘Vancouver/where the train white with snow and night’s fires flees winter’ (from my book of translations Apollinaire: The Little Auto, CBeditions, London); I’ll try to remember to append the whole extraordinary poem below.

But here I am again, looking out on a Sunday mid-afternoon at a drizzly sky. Silence in the streets. Paris is subdued, even if crowds of (judging by the language spoken) mostly French flâneurs/euses filled the streets and bridges yesterday, or dangled their legs from the stones on the edge of the Seine on the Ile St. Louis, noses to the sun. They licked ice cream cones or sat in cafes, talking talking talking. Determined to be gay? Smack in the middle of the bridge between the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St Louis, a crowd gathered around a man playing the piano to the back of Notre Dame, its huge toy yellow crane and scaffold like some giant’s jungle gym.

But today, rain. Shops closed. A day of rest. I’m going to sit in a rocking chair, ugly but comfy, between two windows, one facing west, one north, and read a book called Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, by Christof Koch.

Here’s Apollinaire’s ‘Windows’:

From red to green all the yellow dies

When the parrots sing in their native forests

Pihi massacre

There’s a poem in the bird with only one wing

We’ll send it along in a telephone message

Giant traumatism

It makes your eyes run

Now there’s a pretty girl among the girls from Turin

That poor young man was blowing his nose into his white

necktie

You will lift the curtain

And now see how the window opens

Spiders when hands wove the light

Beauty paleness unfathomable violets

One will try and try to get some rest

We will start at midnight

When one has the time one has the freedom

Winkles Whitefish multiple Suns and the Sea Urchin of sundown

An old pair of yellow shoes in front of the window

Towers

Towers are streets

Wells

Wells are squares

Wells

Hollow trees to shelter the wandering Caperesses

The Chabins sing songs to die for

To the maroon Chabinesses

And the goose honk-honks on its horn up north

Where the muskrat hunters

Scrape skins

Glittering diamond

Beverley Bie Brahic