Night

Filmy curtains
made from the gossamer
of mosquito wings
swirl
like the hem
of a lady's nightgown.

Darkness,
but no sleep
tonight.

At least
the air is salt.
The night
too hot
too hot
but at least
not thirsty.

There is nothing
but nothing
like a night that is thirsty.

J'ai soif,
he whispered.
Toujours soif,
encore soif.
Marseille is salt
and heat
but not dry.

Sleep doesn't come easy
in the city
with a thousand
sins
and a single truth.

So I will remain
a servant of this night.
I will watch
the play of white
against a square of living dark
and wait
to fall...
if I fall
asleep.

sans titre

Lately
When it rains
It really rains
I mean
It pours
Truth
Lies
Drink
Tears
N'importé quoi.

Falling apart
Maybe
Is
Knitting
Newly together
Or maybe
Not.

You're crazy.
Crazy bored
Crazy lonely
Crazy lovesick.

France.
It's a dream
A hoot in hell.
Ah
But how beautiful
Is hell.

Devils?
Elsewhere.
Broken
Or not
Who knows.

It doesn't rain
Not in
San
Diego
But
In Santa Cruz

Also
No.
Only without.

Leave
Really really really
Leave.
Can't.
Come home.
No such thing.

Lately
When it rains
It's inside
Your
Two
Waters.

Return to Strasbourg

It looks like rain. I have Claire’s umbrella in my bag, but if it rains like it did yesterday, I will have to move inside. The papers have been prophesying rain for a week now. Claire tells me that when it is warm and humid, people look for clouds above the Vosges Mountains. For days now there have been a whole army of them. They arrived yesterday, to occupy the sky above Strasbourg. Yesterday the air went from quiet to thunderous as we sat the little café by Place Kleber.


I said I would come back, did I not?


It is not supposed to rain until 6 tonight. Yesterday I did not have an umbrella or a jacket with me, so I walked from the party to the tram stop in torrential rain. I have missed this rain. It rained a while back in San Diego. I was away.


This morning I took breakfast with Claire. I have missed long meals, where forks scraping against plates punctuate lively conversation.


Bonjour, to the two men sitting at the table behind me. I can see on my screen’s reflection that they are reading over my shoulder. Ah, they are laughing.


You speak English? A little. Well, I must congratulate you two for you eyesight…the words on the screen are a little far from you.


I see. Non, Vous parlez bien anglais. C’est vrai. C’est vrai.


Anyway, I went to the modern art museum just near Claire’s appartment. I took the long way this time, looping all the way around. It was a morning for walking. Warm, but not too sunny.


I visited the new exhibit, lingering by my favorites in the permanent collection on the first floor. Antibes, Le Soir, by Signac. Der Wald, by Campendonk. Kandinsky. Everything Kandinsky.


Good-bye, Charles, Antoine. It was nice talking to you.

Nice, Côte d'Azur

Maybe the sun will stay here a while. The quad blooms with it, with grass and daisies and frisbees.

This Summer I will visit Lyon. Perhaps Lyon will be like Nice. Nice is the first city I visited unsupervised. It is so beautiful there, with its narrow alley-streets and palm trees. I was homesick there, because it reminded me so much of San Diego. I had not realized how much I missed cacti until our train roared past the shore and I saw them, standing lone and proud, among poorer grasses.

Nice really is not much like California, besides the climate. The people are different, and the sand is different. The beaches are made of rocks that hurt when you stretch over them. But the air is sweet and fine and salty, and the rocks slowly arrange themselves to the curve of your body the longer you lay there. Soon you are as one of them- a big, fleshy stone who has created its own hollow.


We rented an AirBnb- my first- up a goodly hill not far from the center of town. It was maybe ten minutes' walk from Place Garibaldi. It was funny to me that an Italian national would have his own square in a French city. But it was not that funny and maybe I was trying to show off my learning.

We walked twenty miles a day, to the beach, to Matisse Museum, to the market to buy fresh figs and tomatoes to eat with basil grown en plein air. C'est magnifique, mademoiselle! Regardez!

Nice is the closest I have been to Italy, and Hannah dreamed of Florence as we drank fine Italian red wine with dinner. Perhaps I will go to Florence this Summer too. I have wanted to go after reading The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, and hearing him speak about it.

San Diego nights are violet, Strasbourg nights are blue, and Prague nights are the blackest of black. But in Nice, the nights are golden. Warm, molten, sensuous. The waiters were better educated than doctors. One Signor Luca spoke French, English, Spanish, and Italian. He spoke the last with our new friend, whom we met while stuck in the castle, as he brought us our aperitifs, our arrabiata, and our limoncellos. Their voices danced, lilting like an Irish brogue, but smooth like a Colombian song.

I bought some soca to eat on the train back to Strasbourg.

We missed that train, so I ate it for lunch instead, inhaling the cracked pepper smell and wiping the oil off my fingers with a napkin. (soca is a chickpea pancake sold in Nice).

Anyways, we took the night train back.

Kitsch is in

The Lennon Wall is not hard to find, but we were confused by Czech street signs and  mulled wine. We overheard a group of Italians say that the Wall was just past the French Embassy. We agreed to look for it, and after finding it waiting stolidly for us, disagreed which direction to take from there.

Eventually we remembered that Prague has city-wide WiFi (although I only recall it working in certain areas). Anyways, we had a nice walk and we were not concerned that we were lost. And we realized that there's a sense of satisfaction in tracing a path with your finger on a map, or marking the whole thing up with pencil and imbuing that crinkled document with the scent of a coffee shop.

The light was nearly gone by the time we got there. At dusk, there were not so many tourists. I remember that we crossed a bridge with a silent, white-and-gray cat whose agate eyes followed us. There were locks clustered thickly all up and down the poles- paying respect to Paris, but in a fashion that is infinitely more practical. There was no danger of sagging wire here.

We were alone when we first approached the wall. The Lennon Wall is not very tall, and if not for the graffiti, would be quite unremarkable. The original portrait of John Lennon has long been lost beneath layers of paint and ink. I really did think it would be bigger. I also thought it was just a wall by itself; I did not think it would be attached to anything. In other words, I did not expect it to be functional as an actual wall.

It was funny. Not beautiful, not even a good symbol of protest anymore. It was to fight the coming of kitsch, but in its acquisition of status as a tourist destination, it has became an instrument of Kitsch. The Wall was supposed to be a canvas for the disillusioned and politically conscious youth to splatter their passionate outrage. It was supposed to be their space to decry the excess of the government, of the West, of wealth, of human conceptions of morality and justice.

My eyes traced a lopsided heart. "Marissa and Alex!! August 2015".

But, as Kundera said: "kitsch is an integral part of the human condition". Can we help our own inability to live in the extreme climate of awareness? Can we be held responsible for refusing to leave the warmth of illusion, the safe circle of indifference? Perhaps not.

We heard later that a group of protesters ("damned hippies," exclaimed a red-faced gentleman, throwing his scarf indignantly over his plump shoulder) painted over the messages and pictures because they were kitsch. Disgusted at the Wall's new role as a pawn of the tourism sector and loss of symbolic revolution, they tried to return it to its previous condition- a blank wall and a canvas no longer.

That obviously failed.

A group of American students came, armed with stencils and spray paint. They left behind an image of Richard Nixon, and an image of what looked like a school mascot. In fact, it was some feline animal that looked like every wildcat mascot I've ever seen.



We returned the next day after breakfast. It was a good time to go, although there were more people. There was even a segway tour (which, by the way, are everywhere). Why walk when you don't have to? Hannah has a horror of segways. I turned my face to the sunshine and laughed at her grimaces, listening to the man singing and accompanying himself on the guitar.

No need for greed or hunger
a brotherhood of man...

I wondered if he had children. I threw a few koruna in that man's guitar case and we left quietly for Malá Strana.

AKA I'm Cold

Sometimes the wind blows outside like it's trying to break in. Once I stared outside and imagined a woman scratching at the glass, shrieking and howling like a ghoul. It reminds me of Ireland, especially when it's also raining.

Already this place with its moody skies and sullen clouds feels suspiciously like home. I have come to know the cold winds that blow like spurned women, and the emerald grass that grows stubbornly despite the snow. The sun comes out from time to time, and suddenly sweaters are pushed up past the elbows. People wear shorts in 50 degrees, which is so strange to me.

Those are the good days. Sometimes weeks on gray weeks go by and I feel that a part of me withers as it shivers. The cold and snow really aren't that bad, although they tell me that this Winter has been uncharacteristically mild (woe is me), but snows have a way of making me forget how to speak. It blankets the persistent grass, and it blankets my mind. Curiously, softly, languidly.

I do like bursting through doors and unwinding my scarf, unbuttoning my coat, shrugging it off. I like to bring the clean scent of cold in with me, letting it roll off me in waves, smelling it cling to my hair and my hands. Days like these, I can feel my face growing longer, my skin shrinking from exposure.

I do not welcome this. And yet it touches me. This incessant gray moves me strangely, and not like the glass-shard gray of Irish seas. I go numb here, I think.

It is good I am here. But someday I will be always beneath sun and salt.