By Marc J. Elzenbeck
It’s true that when you travel
you’re never free of Woody Allen.
Every sidewalk artist knows him
and four score more sketchable actors
who’ll ambush you from here to Thailand
icons of the monoculture from which we come.
Such harbingers. It reminds me how the prophets
said the ends of earth express a single sum.
Some foretell of molten glass and crystal seas,
the rest are happy with brimstone and great heat;
I would agree, but their visions only seem to me
like the airports in which we find our selves undone.
Asphalt this might all become, but in Provence with Caitlin,
finally on vacation, the prophets may all kindly
pilgrimage to celebrate St. Vincent. We’re staying
in Les Templiers, much older than our country,
near an inconvenient border in a forgotten city.
Its fortresses decay in ever more strategic ways.
The hotel claims to have two thousand paintings
by fauvists who wintered with Picasso and Braque.
Painted fast for drinks and dinners, traded on the spot
to the famous fish soups of Rene and Pauline Pous.
I don’t believe two thousand, but Pauline was a beauty,
Matisse did her justice in the hallways and the rooms.
O’Brian the Author chose wisely. Machado the Poet
presaged refugees who have not forgotten. In morning
above preserved alleyways we’ll wake to each other
two or even three unhurried times. We’ll throw open creaking
bleached-blue shutters to admit a southern sun, and ascendant
diesel fumes and fresh baguettes will sit down to breakfast.
They’ll bring guilt and disinfectants. Listen, you prophets,
this is no Disneyland. Many are the hidden hands that plied
genocides and silenced honest speakers. The hilltop castle
floating picturesque at night on nothingness, it was bewitched
and much besieged. Real heads have hung and rolled on down
right where we dance to ‘Ghost Riders’ on the shore.
Here were the heretics who exported their most sacred
acts of apostasy to Britain. Here is where we learned
the first words for cold and hot, and can still feed
state-subsidized circus goats tobacco and old enemies.
They asked for more. Here is that terrain your forebears
fled from and never stopped to tell the children why.
We had our first fight. These miles take long to drive.
There will be a town named for a dead pig at Carcassone,
and past Cahors, another for a beloved embraceor.
Yet tonight there was a gentle man, deaf and mute,
peddling lighters in the cafe outdoors; he left a note
explaining those predicaments in his language at our table.
We bought it for two Euros in the absence of America.
It’s curved like an Algerian dagger, a shiny cerulean blue:
when we try it yet again at 3AM there shoot out two
jets of honestly dangerous flame, one for each cigarette
in the addicted couple that we’ve become. They illuminate
the unframed paintings and hiss like dying Cathars, splaying
out in the welcoming angles of some great Horned One.
