Your Feckless SmileYour smile detached and flitted off. We search in the Luxembourg Garden, the Tuileries, the cafes along Boulevard Montparnasse. You fear it has adhered to German tourists or smeared the eloquent stained glass of Saint-Chapelle. I worry that it has disgraced itself drunk at an embassy party where the stuffing comes out of shirts. Why can’t you discipline it? To avoid frightening the world I never smile. No one expects my approval, no one invites me to galas where the champagne flows, no one greets me gladly in the street. My expression avoids extremes so I never have to explain them. Isn’t this why we live in Paris with the Seine in suicidal gloom the cathedral shelled by fire, terrorists gunning down their critics? No sunny Impressionist scenes for us. If you hadn’t loosed your smile we would be too anonymous to suffer existential angst, our bodies so secret that even naked we’d be invisible. The alerted gendarmery searches alleys, bistros, cafes, parking lots in the dusty yellow suburbs where rumors froth with lechery. Next time refrain from flirting with the world. It doesn’t flirt back but takes what it wants with a sneer, leaving its best friends toothless and sopping up muck through a straw. McQuillan’s Last Few Notes Winter thaw exhorts the river to rise and claim our whole village. We and the river got along for the last hundred years but political notions have shifted to the right of that white pine looming over the house where Bob McQuillan died while banging his piano. We still hear his last few notes tinkling like rats rattling trash at the landfill. The river sighs, dreaming of the Mississippi, the Nile, the Volga, the Amazon French-kissing the naked sea. We also have spiked our ambitions, settling for a pittance while stones crack open to release the ghosts fossilized at the planet’s birth. What happens when the universe goes blank in a fit of entropy? A painless erasure, we’re sure-- no more climate to muddle us, no more spirit to corral. We share our usual tall cup of coffee and plan a speechless day of chores, ending with moonlight smoothing every frozen surface. We agree that winter’s easy if expensive, fuel depletion and psychic distress managed the way we manage everything that ruffles our mossy coifs. McQuillan left no ghost to play his folky little compositions, but his final struck notes linger to domesticate the river’s flow. Non-Euclidean Figures |