From a Paris Journal
A cat like a plump cushion in a bicycle basket.
When I wanted something less expensive, I said,
‘D’accord, je chercherai à Londres.’ A cheaper product was found.
It takes me one hour and ten minutes to get
by train from my suburban home to Melbourne’s CBD. It takes just over two hours
to get from Paris to London.
My local is called the Auld Alliance, after
a treaty finally abandoned in the sixteenth century.
I aired my bedding and lost my pillowcase
in the street.
A guy on a scooter wears shoelaces in his runners
which are coordinated with the scooter fairings.
For the first week of Paris Plages it was
too hot to sit on the sand by the Seine.
The only time I left the studio without
wearing lipstick was when I was having an asthma attack.
You cannot buy Ventolin over the counter in
France. This was good as I actually needed corticosteroids.
As the doctor wrote out my script, the
smell of cigarette smoke wafted through the open window from the cafes
downstairs.
I began to dislike cigar smokers.
The scarf is a mystical item capable of
transforming its wearer.
The guy at the vintage shop was reluctant
to sell me the scarf until I had admired all its admirable features.
A signed Colette at the book market, also
the Surrealist manifesto.
I love watching movies in English and then
walking back on to the Champs-Elysees.
The faded ballet slippers someone has put
near the Isadora Duncan plaque in the cemetery have little notes folded into
them.
Every night the homeless sleep outside the
shop selling sofa beds.
Catherine Bateson, 2013
I was sick this week with asthma, so I didn't post a Tuesday Poem, but there are plenty to be read at the
Tuesday Poem hub, beginning with this week's featured poem, 'Early Growth' by Rachel O'Neill - do read it. I've been trying to find a way of writing about childhood ever since I heard the Irish writer, Ailbhe Darcy, read at Shakespeare and Company, and am still searching for my way into this rich territory, which obviously I access a lot for my children's books. Maybe that's why it will take longer to find poetically?
Rachel Neill's poem is guest curated this week by Sarah Jane Barnett. I would have to say that throwing children's parties were kind of (delightful?)hell for me. I was banned from organising Pass the Parcel by my own children. At the fairy/maypole party, a fairy culling from the minority boy hunters was narrowly prevented and the final straw was a disappearing child at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer party. After that they did it themselves! (Yes, she was found. No, she did not have a stake driven through her. Nor was she turned into the walking dead. She was just a drama queen girlie going through some stuff.)
