Hard half-green tomatoes sink, their lank vines bending low beneath the sun’s harsh glare that blazes against the red church tower lying in the valley’s bottom. The garden my grandfather tended behind his muted yellow house has grown into the grass and shrubs, creeping slowly up the mountain, beyond his mottled fingers’ reach. His spade lies on [...]
Every dog has its night to run free licking the juice of bruised blackberries, fallen in the dirt, not heeding the mothers’ voices calling their children home through the dark, or the soft mosquito whir in the humid air.
At night I dream of half-remembered roads and the cadences of another language stopping and swaying like the movement of a metro car in the dark between stations. I expect to wake to the smell of bread in city streets and the cries of the cheese man, le fromager (a word so much more beautiful [...]
Between the graves and falling snow we climb through rows of stone veiled and silent except for the repeated cry of a blackbird. At Oscar Wilde’s tomb we stop and press our chapped and frozen lips, for a moment, against the stone and lipstick smears and whisper our thanks into the wind.
“Vous êtes tous exilés” my professor said in the darkened room yesterday afternoon. And I thought about how there is no going back, only going into another exile towards which I’ll gladly run – to be at once of all lands and no land. I carry Paris with me in photographs, caught in the fibers [...]
Beside the sluggish Thames we walk or through the streets of Soho until the fall of dusk. Clatter down the crowded stairs, plunge into the Underground, hurtle east and west and north in black and twisted tunnels. We wander past the palace gates shining with a coat of ice and stare blank-faced at the guards [...]
The spire of the Tour Eiffel is lost in mist, glowing vaguely in the night. Snow has been drifting to lie in frozen waves for the past two nights and days, clothing the city in crystal and ice. Beneath the lights, blue and white, we slip and stumble in the night through Montmartre, up the [...]
Between the Colosseum stones a white dahlia pushes upwards, its petals unfurling one by one, shedding the weight of the morning’s rain. It brushes against the stones as its ancestors have done for two thousand or so long years, their roots inching outwards into the nooks and cracks of masonry. In one or two more [...]
Children run screaming through rows of dark gray stone columns. Their fingers brush the walls, footsteps echoing back and forth. Their mothers slump on the edge, shoulders sagging, eyes closed. Neither searches for the meaning of this place, to extract some easy definition. Inside the field, the ground slopes down, at first just inch by [...]
The flow of days has settled in a steady allegro rhythm worn into the Parisian streets and cobblestones, beaten into the metro stairs and the soles of my shoes. Months subsided into weeks, driven west in a November wind to ruffle the freezing Atlantic and wash up, covered in brine, on a distant coast. December [...]