Raining Empire, and: A Debate about Realism, and: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Raining Empire

Paris 1870

All night on the townrained an iron rain.We watched houses explode.We watched churches burnin the Prussian hurricane.

The beautiful fires spreadas we watched from Montmartre.Mortal red and gold scarredour black republican skycrumping the Latin Quarter

and most of the hospitalswith their healing-huddled beds,most screaming infant schools,while at the Invalideshysteric Prussian shells

shrill as harpies in Wagnernever woke the slumbererin the huge sunken vaultfit for an emperorof porphyry and basalt.

      If in 1870      Napoleon's shrewd eye could spy      France so outfoxed, he'd blanch to stone,      Waterloo-dumbstruck. Nonetheless,

empire has its ups. The ThirdRepublic, starved out, fattened upPrussia. Wise men, take heart: relax,sip wine and bask on Elba.

A Debate about Realism

Tissot posed British Colonel Burnabystretched like Olympia, beneath a mapof empire where the sun refused to set.Down his long form ran an endless red stripe;in his hand pulsed the latest cigarette.A breastplate dazzling as a jewel satidle. A red-dyed horsehair crest atophis regimental helmet, combed in a splitwalrus mustache, whispered, "Good show! Pip-pip!"By the fall of 1870

Tissot left drawing rooms for drawing war,first French infirmaries displaying woundswith the best of taste, and cheery portraitureof infantry and canteen girls, and friends.One friend in arms, Cuvelier the sculptor,caught a bullet. On impulse, Tissot sketchedfrom life—from death, which got Degas enraged."Bringing his body back would have been better."

      Bloody fields, now bloody town,      the crimson stripe down officers'      uniform legs I used to paint      runs from young men shot on the street.

In Tissot's print, The First Killed Man I Saw,a soldier, pack full, pitches headlong downa town wall dissolving like a waterfall.Cuvelier's unrecognizable,anonymous, a truly private man.We don't have an opinion from Degas.A Communard, Tissot chose English exileand saw his fame take off across the Channel.

      Painting London's rich at play,      thank God for toothsome, healthy girls,      giant silk bows thrust out at you,      gift-wrapping for a round rump.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Le Comité scientifique invitesstrategies to save the City of Lights.Suggestions from the interested publicwill be entertained. But make them quick.The terrorists camp just outside the gates.

Launch a thousand coal tar gas balloonssuspending a mallet with a head fifteenmiles wide and weighing, say, ten million tons,then simply cut it loose above the Huns.

Druggists, dump your arsenic in the Seineflowing to Prussian hq at Versailles.Its heavy metal tang will dignifythe palate nursed on knucklebone of swine.

Rifles for women, decked in pantaloonsand black and orange caps—the Amazonsof the Seine! Melt down the cathedral bellsto forge two hundred cannon with their shells.Future centuries will admire our glassglobes bursting with napalm and poison gas.

      Let the zoo unlock the cage      of every long-starved carnivore.      Point the beasts southwest, toward Versailles.      Let's see Bismarck fight tiger fangs!

Decompose their air and suffocate them!Electrolyze their water and ignite themwith the liberated hydrogen!We'll invent a musical machine gunto lull them with Wagner, Schubert, Mendelssohn,

then perforate them with French bulletholes—when we play them like pianola rollsthey'll change their tune: Bizet and Berlioz.

      Paris whores, go man the streets—      manipulate our enemy!      Once engaged, prick back armed with pins      pregnant with prussic acid.