Poincaré

Only silence accompanying your footfall on the stone bridge
Dimpled with age and become soft with water
As the shadows narrow and extend across the stone
and the flow of clear umber liquid underneath and the sun
explodes into your eyes, shaded by your narrow hands

Apomythopió
to uncover
Aletheia
to say
to mean
the world without end
and the final nonchalance
the final dance and artifice for

Resolve is nothing without water,
There is nothing more than the flows that unite
the strings unto the spheres where you reside

Resolve in nothing without stone
The kernel of youth my preponderance for a
bare utterance about the distant summer

Light in your eye's eyes
The travel in them and your voice
Lips like the dips of fingertip on water
Ripple and dissipate like the universe, and

You the utmost angel
tread the world in nonchalant
patience and quiver to
make candid your life in
secret photographs
looking for commentary
refract life through the inane
bemusings of heart more feeling
than most-- but what end
what entrails of love what
forbidden smiles have we
suffered to make the fragmentation
of the one image you sought
come whole again across these
winters these bold summers
these fingers now made more beautiful
by the precise chiseling of time,
and dull with the gasping knowledge of
of having given, having given to and
been unrequited except for a flower,
a chocolate bar, a photo of you
made lovely and there are those that
know and wish to remember; and some
will never forget, some will hold you close
though you may not know.

And your ghostly image in the garden
only fades slowly and the water runs still
making the moss more verdant on the stone,
the birds there peck at the echos of your foot over
the rocks and the sky closes curtain-like upon our visions
when sunset begs the shadows lengthen across your skirt
and the reverberation of wind makes the silence tenable upon your lips.

the pure nova of the heart
that could not contain
the heat nor the vast
vacuum that engenders
you in the torsion of my
mind's eye the scales expand and
we dilate topologies contract to simplify
and make beautiful the bare utterance
about the distance summer
Where these gardens could not welcome you
nor these words embed the worlds enough to meet you
because the distance hushes and you are always far and close
As distances contort and metrics are impossible but there is the music
The sole vibration resonates till silence reigns and comprehension begins

I lay the café noisette
and return to the empty paris street
between charonne and faidherbe-chaligny
and let the sun wash across my broken face;
what after wars and growth and inflation and social protection
what after youth and promises and abandonment and hope
will finally forge action from will
and make firm the
the dream is still to build the starship and
transport us there,
the blue guitar
the chalice the
sparrow that utters not sings
the myths of our noble race
the lies of our fathers
our own lies
resolved slowly into hope; what more
could we utter than the world itself
or music or mathematics or
technology;

Where the corn fields and the umber of smoke
The failing car
The jarred open windows and the wind
As we drove past the border into Katowice
As we stoked the engine of our human heart
To lift the slow expansion of wings we do not have
Unto the Pleiades though they too are our invention

Proper Breakfast Sometimes

Sometimes, one needs a civilized breakfast. So I discovered this kick-ass dark german bread store in the Bastille Market... and ever since, I have been completely hooked. It's dark, robust, and malty... great with butter, fried eggs, some ham. The funny thing is that this bread is sort of hidden amid the stash of baguettes. But you can easily tell they are covert germans in frog-land from their accent: "vooo voolez une bagette, ja!?" and then you tell the rotund ladies to cut the crap and hand over the Schwarzbrot... They give you this sort of coy smile and hand the heavy loaf over, making sure not too many frenchmen are looking. Then, after, you walk back to your apartment, sack full of bread, peppers, apples, cream, eggs, whatever, and cook up the breakfast-- guy-style, all messy and dilettantish and a smirk, and then you put on some music and munch it down with strong coffee and some sugar.

rain paris sunday afternoon

Some sundays you want to curl up, chin against your knees and look at the window counting the rain-drops speckling the pane, idle and silent. It's a long wait for springtime here. We see the glimpses of sun on weekends but sometimes it's like this, the slow attrition of the season hushed and huddled at the windowsill. There is nothing to do, really; no motion or pain or wonder. I don't even remember what I was doing this time of year last year-- a muted February spent in the throes of parting. I think we spent the last days cooking; bok-choi and rice. Simple like that. It's not good that nostalgia seeps in, but sometimes it does; sometimes then you wish to scoop up with both palms all the water that slipped past the fingers that are everywhere and nowhere, uncollectable, and you are left like that, cheeks against the pane wondering if those were tears, so many raindrops.

TartOff

So this is something we did waaaay back in 2007, which I should have posted before but had neglected, which deserves more than just these few photos, but nevertheless in the spirit of late-is-better-than-never I'm putting them up.

Rkhooks decided that she'd impart some of the precious cordon-bleu secrets to making a tart one fine November day. And so we shuffled off to the Bastille market to see what it had to offer and discovered a number of things which would be use to fill the tart crust and our tummies:

SAVOURY -by yours truly (note brit spelling)
(1) Sardines, to be accompanied by fresh-ground pesto with tons of basil and pignoles, and tomato for sweetness
(2) Girolles, to be mixed in with a weirdo magical mushroom that tasted like rubber soles. With butter and parsley and a bit of violet garlic.

SWEETE - by Rkhooks (note archaic spelling, by yours truly)
(1) Large, orange pumpkins. They looked more like alien rock from the outside.
(2) The last sweet figs of the year. Bursting and rose-colored, with marscapone they will be delectable.

Thus, our four tarts. We met back after the market around 6pm and Rkhooks got in her I'm-a-pastry-chef-don't-mess-with-my-butter fascist mode and began creating the tart crust from flour, eggs, and butter... she even brought her own ring for the tart. Zeta, our trusty companion (and subsequently my housemate) flapped around with an apron on, but was finally ostracized from the kitchen with a curt point of the finger by Rkhooks.

The girolles took the most time: we had to brush off the dirt from the delicate fungus surface, which I did with utmost care, and yet managed to still destroy half of them. Besides, they were a bit too big.



One by one, we managed to prepare the tarts as the impatient (and 1 sleepy) guests arrived and fidgeted, offered to help, took photos, or slept. The tarts went into our illustrious oven, otherwise known as the "oven from hell", with a standard operating temperature of about that of the Universe right after the Big Bang. It's a great appliance to have in a cold apartment.

The results are more or less as you see in the pics (except the pumpkin pie, which was so good that we finished it before any photos were taken). The fig tart was the most beautiful, with generous drollops of marscapone slightly melting between the caramelizing figs. But my personal favorite was the pumpkin pie. Unlike the US Thanksgiving-type canned variety, this was not to sweet, had a deep nutty aroma, and a wonderful texture and density given to it by the roasting of the pumpkins in the oven-from-hell before putting the filling in the pie crust.

Appear

To speak of love, once
I would write, and sometimes
Through some distractions, the

light, the somnolence breathes only you
because the sincere thought of age, the ageless,
the neglect, the wholesale emotions you never believed
because since four years ago, you could never believe
anything, nor did you notice that the sun rises still and
warms your eyelids before you wake.

This makes me fade, the faceless encounters
the undue repentance of the foliage of conversation grow
and grows too old, I am too old for this already, too old for walking
barefooted along the beach sides, leaning out atop of the towers
of this city we've lived in, and to peep out across a horizon that could
engender imagination again.

To chisel out the emotion from the thousand cliches the thousand lies.


Nothing is personal. Nothing calms but the dull repetition.

What could I offer. What will I insist. What civility ensnares me to be banal.
Nothing is elegaic here, not even boulevards we imagined before our arrival here.

with your glittering shoes,
a touch of melancholy in your aqua eyes
a touch of melon
a touch
even

as I followed your tip-toes thinking you had
wings, but there only I saw
your glitter-covered shoes
tread lightly on the water

really a puddle on a street in Barbican
or the ruddy mud of Barbizon, but
you could never traverse the street
without waiting for me, and I could not follow
but I stuttered in my steps, splashing
wetness, leaves, sediment on my cuffs.

are you not the chronic muse I missed--
all those bare-soled nights in the hostels across
the continent and in the cheap bars serving nothing
but no thought bled to me, your only slave to music
the thought of you, beatrice to my urgings for
the fear of death, so soon in life, so soon in a star's
blink-- and maybe you would bridge the vacuums
the summers wading in canals,
cattails swinging above our faces, and the blue willow
washing across a bluer sky, do you remember.


* * *

incandescent coral makes no cage for mermaids nor
for the tropics you could conjure poetry from the rapture of
fingers in the ocean by and large indifferent to our electric cities
or the fiberoptics on the floors as vast as a bumblebee
that could you make me cry no more like a camel on the deserts
to transport the textiles across lands stranger than my own.

The strangeness of self, the redundancy of life, the slow stupor
of age, these now conspire to make me intuit my own form from the
dregs of a tired conversations in oily diners or the bar at the Crillon.

The bus churns its routine as do the thousand silver-lined footsteps of
these parisian girls, walking, bicycling, swift and adept, a praxitelian
marvel of finesse of form, and myself unbound, unkempt, unshaven.

Am I still a child, and was that perfection. Can anything be constant.
So years later, I walk down this same avenue. This tree was here, this
chipped marble on the facade. This sun, is it the same, or more fatigued.
What could make me cry, but your lingering perfume, a subtle sweet musk
and citrus, makes me think of your lips. Here, you were, and now you
are like a effervescence that my idle words conjure from a scene. Appear,
Verona. And the silence still reigns, and the music of those times reverberate
in my fingertips; I have coarser skin, more stubble, but I will my eyes the
force of having lived, this fire in me still.

The suffocation of desire too long expired, as if your lips would open to utter counsel
now, years on, now the the seas have calmed their torpor and the skies have
roiled and settled. We are survivors, we all, in these cities cradling our infant souls
in the flat monochrome of the landscape devastated by our impotence.
We have had our presidents, our wars and robberies, our businesses, our toasts
in hotel lounges, our infernal love-making in cold tenements; we have acquiesced
to regimes and to nature, to our parents and most urgently our own
repressions. And now, the peace is unsettling, because I walk here and
still your eyes persist in such ways that I crave the illusion. Catarina, so your spells
are not over, your ankles still tread the rue St. Denis, your hands against the
walls here, and against my cracked lips your finger and your eyes the forest of light,
the expansive trickling light from the canopy above, your touch, your regard, the
endeavor for the smile in your eyes.

* * *
I want you there, in the rain pouring tea from broken pots in my room, sitting there
like a lady should, like a girl, like a baby.

But you are more abstract than my own heart now. "you."

Could you unbreak me. Could you make me young. Could you exist in more
than a breath, as if

the world could stop for you and me, the vast montages from a hundred cinema scenes
of sunsets, oceans, skylines across Manhattan, and a crisp soundtrack

the best cliches, because
it's sometimes an effort, when it rains like this,
in the somber kitchen, the pot steams and you hum your tunes and you tread
barefooted on the unwashed tiles and glance at me

through the quiet or through memories that fall like snowflakes in my mood.

No sugar for the tea, only milk.
You cup the bowl and draw the aroma; a perfect movie.
And you are as ever abstract, as ever beautiful but
Not of me.

Why is the Coffee Here So Much Better !!??

Why can't the French make coffee right? Or anyone else, for that matter with the possible exception of some over-eager Cubans (but their cafe con leche is more syrupy dessert than beverage). As far as coffee is concerned, Italia Campione!!

This morning I was walking back from a meeting near the Porta Ticinese. I was stuttering around in a comatose stupor as I had not had breakfast and was totterting around on the uneven stone pavement and the wetness and rain everywhere. For some reason, Milan is one of those places (as with London) that from my own experience i associate with rain and cold and perpetual grayness -- probably I always happen to go in the fall and winter.

I step into a random caffè, lining the dull arcade of a Corbusian monolith just outside the Porta Ticinese. In contrast to the drab mid-20th century exterior, the inside is warm, decorated, and bustling. The barista is briskly jiggling the machine and filling the espressos. Colorful panini and breads covered in powdered sugar deck the green-marble counter. I order a cappuccino to start off my wet day.

And it arrives, a blink later, steaming and swirling with the cacao before me-- milk frothing and rich. I take a sip, and the silky sweetness enwraps me, and I all of a sudden forget my wet soles, the itch in my back, the damp hair-- everything really, and all motion in the universe stops for a moment for this single cappuccino in this random place. Standing and dousing it down in the de rigeur in-a-hurry milanese style, I rushed off toward the cold beckon of the city to walk some more.

I passed by Cova, the renowned if over-priced pasticceria on via Montenapoloene... (note photo of tarte with fraise du bois). Even the tarts of this high-end pastry place is somehow, for lack of better word, cuter, more humane and promethean, less olympian than the cold perfectionism of french top-end pastry shop. It's less about gloss than about stuffing the surface with all sorts of yummy multi-colored fruits of the season. And without the marketing art that characterize the French genius, it naturally looks tasty. This is the subtle genius of Italy when it comes to gastronomy, sartorial diction, vespas and streetcars and life.

Noticing the Winter Approaching

Yesterday I came home from a long day. The trainride to Fontainebleau was incongruously beautiful, the mist arching over the Seine, the grey poplars and heavy willow lapping against the banks and the train gliding through this country. It was cold, and the windows were fogged, and I held my hands together to warm them. Arriving back at home, I made some tea, curled up and then some music from Feist or Longview was languidly playing in the background and I slowly become horizontal on the sofa, somewhat cat-like and compact. I cupped the tea-bowl and pouted my lips looked out the window. Winter seemed to have crawled up from behind us and have overtook Paris without my noticing. The seasons catch me by surprise this year, and again the trees are more barren more suddenly than I could remember. The backdrop is again the pale-blue quiet luminescence of the the cold sky I shrug, shiver slightly, and drink down my tea.