I want to write a prose poem for Paris! In the last week, I’ve read them all over. But I’ve missed the last few trips- trivially, always. Last time I made it to that sunshine city, of fresh baguettes and bowls of chocolat chaud, was years ago now- we fell out of that plane onto gravel. It was the month of heat stroke, circles (thousands!) of boroughs around the city died off in nursing homes, private vegetable gardens, underneath parched apple trees. It was all on television; I watched a hundred people run over each other- every corner store was raided as they panic-bought fans and bottled water. My brothers slumped around the hotel room, opened the shutters as wide as their arms reached. My mother folded accordion fans out of newspaper, we sweated and bruised, and the room was rich velvet, deep scarlet, carpeted to the ceilings. Our bathroom was all mirrors, and I filled up the tub with ice cubes and did not leave it. This is not a poem and it does not do Paris justice.
I want to drink water from vases and wine from boxes, I want Owen plucking les moules out with emptied shells, I want fries soaked in vinegar, salade tomate, foie gras, confit de canard. I desire cream and butter in everything. Vines seeping out of old hotel windows, women in scarves, boys who look like Bard, but do not speak our slang.
Trying to leave the squeamish behind. Learning the anatomy of a cow, edibility-wise. Want to learn to debone a duck, flay open a fish, make piles of pork shoulders on the counter. Or I’d never make it at Le Cordon Bleu.
But this is what I’m missing- for the love of light! The power of naps, but mine are now all daymares. Wake drenched in confusion and sweat, drowning in sheets and my duvet, and what is my head doing this end of the bed? I thought I was diagonal, triangular. The boy with skinny wrists, says, what are your DEEPEST dreams? Multi-layered memories. Assuming déjà-vus. This week is weird, I am disconnected. I am swamped in the fantastic. There is something uncanny in selling my soul- I should have known!
This is Orangette’s story, but like Robert’s, I want it for my own:
“In the summer of 2002, his last summer, the harvest was especially impressive, almost overwhelming. I'd slow-roast pan after pan of tomatoes, halved and salted and brushed with olive oil. That fall, when he was sick and bed-ridden, he told me dazedly of a dream he'd had in which we'd grown 10,000 beautiful tomatoes in the backyard. Ten thousand, he said. I loved being able to tell him that it wasn't a dream; he'd actually done it.”
I would add: I dreamed I lived! And: Well, You did! And I do… I miss being alone and starving in the summer, what a strange thought. I miss pulling fat tomatoes from their vines, my mouth watering as I drizzled vinegar and olive oil…and sometimes I think the best thing in the world (!) is fresh tomatoes on Italian bread buttered with Kerry-Gold, and sprinkled with sea salt.
As the recipe recites, “each of the three elements, the bread itself, the rosemary, and the potatoes, have a natural affinity with olive oil.” How perfect.
Question yourself. What would you eat if you could only eat one thing? (I would eat bread and butter. Or dumplings, perhaps, until I became round and happy. Fingers always full of flour, plump elbows leaning on dough, a big glass bottle as a rolling pin. Bamboo baskets or boiling pots of stock, ginger, spring onions, and egg yolk.)Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000? (I think so.) Malcolm ate a handful of hot peppers once at a Chinese restaurant. The walls were light blue and the waiters kept bringing him plates of sliced cucumbers.
Below: New Years breakfast. I tugged on the sleeves of Liza’s dress as the sun rose, and she swatted me away until light streamed through the window onto her little mattress.
A hummingbird’s heart beats 1,000 times a minute. Trying to remember that book where he reached into a hole in a chest and took hold of a man’s beating heart. Or maybe I dreamed it. Or maybe it was me- I reached in and took hold of his beating heart. Or maybe it was my own.
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