Blind Date with Baudelaire
- Blind Date with Baudelaire
He screeches to a stop in a taffeta casket—a fancy man, I see.I'm all done up, too, in my party dress and glass beads fromthe Seine. We careen through mad crooked streets, pastlaughing harlots and runaway dads, clatter acrosscobblestones up to Montmartre, sail off Lover'sLeap down and down to the dormant pit.Baudelaire unbuttons my skin to smellmy bones, summons our future bymoony lamplight, how our fingerswill twine side by side. He sayspilgrims will read poems toour stones, as they do forde Beauvoir and Sartre,they will leave roses,damp kisses, andoverripe verse.
Charles gives me hisspleen on the nightwe wed. And whynot? It is alwaysbetter to burytwo poets ina singleplot. [End Page 7]
Pamela Davis is a California native living in Santa Barbara and plotting her next trip to Paris. She spent 30 years as a freelance writer and editor specializing in health and medicine before returning to her first love, poetry. She reads her poetry annually at Shakespeare & Company in Paris and at the Books & Authors Festival in Santa Barbara. Pamela is currently finishing her first chapbook. As a poet and essayist, Pamela is inspired by dead French writers, overheard conversations, tricks of memory, and hiking the hills behind her home. The daughter of a mortician, she is not afraid to write about death, although the wildfires in California scare her silly.
