Back...

in Paris, and a day spent catching up on emails and filling the fridge. Now home and watching it grow dark outside at 5pm, which makes it much harder to spend the late afternoons reading Borges on a chair under the Luxembourg Garden redwoods, even if the weather is warm enough to do so. 

There were pumpkins "for jack o'lanterns" in the supermarket--a first. In the south we observed the Toussaint (All Saints, Nov 1, the day of the dead) in advance by doing a little cleaning up of my husband's parents' grave, reminding me of the year we visited, by ferry--extra sailings in November--Venice's island cemetery over All Saints. Whole families sweeping tombs, picnicking on and beside them. My husband says he was dragged as a boy to Marseille's cemetery every year in November, and hated it. 

Chrysanthemums--France's traditional cemetery flowers--everywhere, huge sprays of them in autumn colours. Once, as a young bride in the south of France I took a bouquet of chrysanthemums, then just pretty flowers for me, with perhaps Asian associations, to a dinner party, and my hostess looked at me strangely. Later my husband explained. Couldn't he have told me ahead of time and saved me the retrospective embarrassment? Not the last time someone in France was to look at me strangely--say for sitting on a sofa with my legs curled up under me, or, running around the house barefoot.

Finished reading Elena Ferrante's Story of Those Who Flee and Those Who Stay. Two more volumes of hers waiting on my doorstep last night. And that it one thing about Amazon--I can buy Italian books, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain, as easily as if I were living in Italy.

Favourite Walk

It is four o’clock in the afternoon and I am walking to the next village, some 45 minutes on foot, 10 in a car. The road climbs through olive groves and vineyards, reaches a col, winds down through vineyards—Cotes du Rhone now, so every available patch of land is cultivated. The grapes have been harvested and the vines are turning yellow—soon they will red. I eat some of the tiny clusters the pickers left, glean more to take home for supper. The light is beautiful, warm, glittering off pines trees on the hills above the road.

This is one of my favourite walks—because it is beautiful in the way of land that has been farmed for ages, whose fields are contoured by time and geology; because it goes mostly uphill one the way there and downhill back, as all good hikes do; because the other village, off the beaten track, has changed very little in the past thirty years and because its Place de l’Eglise has a spectacular view of the Dentelles de Montmirail. Houses tumble down the hillside. Above the church there is a rock molar with an old iron cross askew at the top. Its limestone is crumbly. The Dentelles de Montmirail are known to rock climbers around the world; here signs warn us clear, even of the trail that twists up to the cross.

Café du Village

We have been in a village, connected to my husband's family, in the south of France for almost a week now. We have no internet in the house, so I am sitting on a stone bench outside my brother-in-law's house borrowing his connection. It is Sunday noon; I've just been to the village shop to buy some yogurt, pears, tomatoes and pate to keep us going until Tuesday when the shop will open again. And also the paper, Le Monde.

The café cum shop was busy: a couple of men sitting at the counter talking with the cafe owner and his wife, more outside on the terrace, and several of us in the grocery-magazine-newspaper section, buying provisions, or just looking at the wine selection. Now I am going to trek back down hill and think about lunch.

Crowds

Baudelaire's theme, or one of them. Of which my favourite poem is his sonnet "The Passerby," a classic anecdote about the person whose eye you catch in some public place, the person with whom you feel an immediate rapport, but whom you will never see again. In his case, and most often, in poetry, it is a man who sees a woman, This can be updated, not just the woman who sees the man, but any potential friendlover. When there is no erotic ping is perhaps the most moving: you have a sense of connecting with some other. It could be a dog you are about to euthanise...

But I was thinking about something else when I got onto this. How, when I walk down the Bd St Germain, among the crowds, I always find myself zigzagging to avoid the people walking against me. Why don't they zigzag, I think resentfully, why always me? So when they come on, I stop, I force them to flow around me.

But I have discovered the secret of walking in Paris crowds (does this happen in NYC, in London?): no one makes eye contact, but if you keep walking, at the last moment, everyone twitches their shoulder slightly, so that you pass without touching, though you feel the slight change in airflow.

I could compare this to crossing the street. In California, mostly the cars slow well before the crosswalk, if you are waiting to cross. Here, the cars stop--at the last possible second, and sometimes you need to look like you are going to walk right out in front of them: they aren't going to hit you, but if you have a heart attack, that's ok.

Shopping

There's always the Bon Marché (see Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames aka The Ladies' Delight for the story of the growth of a department store--or as in Babar  "The Big Store" (le grand magasin)--in c19 Paris) of course, nice to walk around, but only on a day you leave your purse and your appetite at home. I go there if I want something normally cheap and useful, a very nice tea towel, say, the one you hang on the oven and never use, but which matches the floor tiles and the set of mugs you found at Monoprix.

Monoprix! I haven't been there yet. It's a treat I'm saving. Monoprix on the Bd St. Michel, in between two branches of the bookstore, Gibert: papeterie and three floors of books, one on the corner of the rue Racine (which meets the rue Corneille at the Odéon) and the other on the corner of the rue des Ecoles. Groceries downstairs, scarves and face creams and toothpaste on the main level, and upstairs, clothes and colour-coordinated household goods, mugs, plates. Everything here changes every month or so, including the colours, and it's a great place to pick up a bargain whatnot or other. A pair of slippers. It's on my way to and from the gym, behind the Musee de Cluny, whose courtyard I ducked into yesterday. Sure enough the hot pink hollyhock was poking up through the cobbles, almost a weed, unplanned, but left to return again and again.

Sexy

I'm thinking how everything is sexier in Paris, but in particular, from a female perspective, the men, who dress in tight trousers and swing their hips. It looks good coming and going, or following. 

Also, lots of people on bikes, but no one--no one!--wears a helmet. Girls with their hair streaming behind them--a helmet would spoil that, but still, doesn't anyone care about the cars? 

Conversation entre deux portes

Bonsoir Madame. Vous venez de chez Mme B, n'est-ce pas? Je said que c'est l'heure ou vous vous retrouvez...

Oh vous savez, on a tres peu de choses en commun...

Ah?

On a des douleurs par ce temps, n'est-ce pas?

Poems

I think I have a new manuscript of poems that I am provisionally calling "In-flight entertainment." But I've worked on it so much that I need not to think about it for a while and then go back and see if it still holds up, both the individual poems and the overall shape of the collection.

So in the meantime I am going back through old poems, the ones that were half-finished and left aside, ones I thought were finished but which I now see weren't, but which feel worth working more on--which, increasingly, means whittling them down to something barer and maybe rougher. Other activities--like looking at Duchamp, like moving to another part of the world, with the shocks, like translating or writing an article--help to see things differently. 

Can't always trust my judgement, however. A couple weeks ago I took a poem I'd pulled out of my own slush pile, and which surprised me by its rightness to a poetry group meeting over in Berkeley. Only my friends there weren't impressed by most of it--I'd been so sure it was a keeper, but there you go. I put most of it back in the slush pile. They are people whose judgement I respect.