And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

While Walking on France

111 While Walking on France Call it the time of bread in Cannes: baguettes in stacks like ammunition, jumbled croissants, and bins of buns and rolls. At the hotel desk, Sonya and Nadeige sing the French they speak. Madame Antoine, whose son Deleuse, Cannonier 1st Class, died at twenty in Algeria, carefully counts coins. Postcards on the Rue d’Antibes remember Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Bardot, Gabin and Robert Mitchum. At the Moulin de Mougins a festival ago, Sharon Stone bankrolled a banquet for AIDS. Villas in “high” Cannes nestle (yes, like nests) in grottoes guarded by monitors and bougainvillea. Bentleys, Daimlers and Porsches cruise the Autoroute as privately as hearses for the totally enclosed. Sepulchrally asprawl on beaches loll the supine and the prone, their tans proceeding by degrees. Beside a hotel pool a girl strips to one triangular swatch to model swimsuits for the trade. This land where taste is king and genuine panache is queen 112 attracts and puzzles me. Does French reluctance spring from stubbornness or thought? What prompts French chocolatiers to make the package more seductive than the purchase? Who but these slim-skulled brothers of Rimbaud accord great chefs a reverence reserved for kings or popes? Each time that France is underfoot I memorize but never judge why pigeons chortle the only song they know, how palms upsurge into a fountainhead of leaves, or why the twin born last in France is legally the elder . . . As men essentialize and women existentialize, I focus on ideas and ignore the facts. The facts, I come to see, are France. They state their own philosophy. The more I know of it, the less I understand. The less I understand, the more I know that some confusions never yield to reason. ...