Sometimes I look around at the props I use in this enormous stage I inhabit. Even though I am not pretending to be anyone else anymore, that doesn't always mean I don't need things around me to keep me on track of who I really am. Sometimes these props are tanglibe things, and sometimes they are simple words that serve to help me, to remind me that pretending to be someone else isn't where I need to be.

In Paris in 1995, I found a little antique shop on a side street near Notre-Dame. In that shop I bought an old tarnished necklace of the icon of Sainte Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. I wore that necklace every day for the next few years, and sitting here now I wonder where it's got to. I wonder if Sainte Genevieve has left me for another poor and confused young woman, one tainted by life but yearning and believing that there is more for her out there, more life than she can hold in the broken plastic spoons that she holds in trembling fingers. And if indeed she has left me and hangs around the neck of someone that needs her more, then I wish her many days of warming a spot on the throat of someone who just needs to be set free.

In that bookshop I also bought a book of French poetry. It was a ragged old book with a dusty maroon cover. I read it many times in the years to follow, and some things within those pages stay with me still no matter where I go. I think about when I bought it, the day after I met Kim for the first time. The day after he held me and we danced by the Seine on a frozen night in March, the lamplight showing a face looking at me in a way I had never been looked at before.

The poem is called "Le Pont Mirabeau", and here it is in English.

Beneath Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
and our love; Must I remember?
Joy always followed pain
Nights, hours,
Days go by yet I remain.

Love flows away like this running water,
Love abandons me.
How life is slow
And I am violated by Hope.
Nights, hours,
Days go by yet I remain.

The days and weeks go by
Nor time
Nor love returns.
'˜Neath Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
Nights, hours,
Days go by yet I remain.

And when I think of that poem, I think of Kim.

I had that book for many years, until the memory of it was too hot to hold in my hands, to loud to be quietly held in a bookshelf. I couldn't cope anymore, and it met with the business end of the fireplace during the dark winter in Sweden.

But the poems stay inside my head, even if the ashes were conscribed to the sky.

One line of a poem is the deathwatch beetle to a relationship. In the years that followed and in whatever relationships I was in, there was a line of a poem that was, to me, a sign. It would pop into my head unbidden, and when it did, I knew that there was trouble. It was the grim reaper that would slice the relationship in half. So sitting across someone at a table with my feet curled beneath me, if I heard the line, I knew that a break-up was coming. In the hallways that inevitably mark the turning points in my relationships, if it floated in my head, I knew the end was coming.

Even as I'm loving you, I am letting go.

And then it would be over.

But somehow the desolation of the two poems has, over time, become tangled with the beautiful hope that our Gallic neighbors can infuse. The two dark poems that mark painful milestones in my past have been introduced to the new possibility of light that marks the current point in my life. The French poet Lucien Becker has two poems that now swirl around me.

On a very sunny last Saturday Angus and I found ourselves in the bedroom. I found my fingers opening the front zipper of his trousers and sliding them to the floor. I unbuttoned his shirt and spread my fingers across his chest. In the sunlight of the bedroom, he laid me down on the bed, a splash of sunlight across my body, already naked, already waiting. In smooth motions we slide around each other, the windows open, the sunshine hot.

I look out the window and see our neighbor, a helictoper pilot, watering his garden while still in his uniform. A smile on my face, I tell Angus I've been naughty, and he pauses in the sun to hear my sexual confession. I tell him that I invited the pilot over the afternoon before and, on our bed, I had wild and illegal sex with him, making him promise to not tell anyone. With the window open and the possibility of being heard, I tell him all the things the pilot did to me, and it's all too much for both of us and we reach a sensational orgasm together. And at the end, he holds me close and kisses my sweaty forehead as we look out the window at the pilot watering his garden, and he is back to being just a neighbor, not a bed-mate.

I didn't misbehave, I only introduced the idea of him in order to allow our limbs to tangle even more than they had before.

I couldn't misbehave with him, as in my world, there is only Angus.

My hands seek out the part of you
where my stroking makes its silky sound
and our bodies stay standing with the weight
of a whole town's walls against them.

With a single look, with a single kiss,
I am nearer your body than you will ever be
and your mouth alights on mine
a little like the froth on a dark stream.

And even though deep inside of me I am still small and dark and quiet, there is something in me that wonders if the girl that got set free from who she was never really left. Even if I can't remember the feel of that necklace on my skin, even if I can't remember what it felt like to have his hands on the small of my back, it doesn't mean that my life is going to be spent in fear, in pain or in loss, or on the run. Someday maybe I will reconcile who I was with who I am becoming, but until then the tiny person inside of me has to just listen to the props in my head and know there is a reason for them.

Which brings me back to Becker.

I know death can do nothing to me
so long as you stay between it and me,
so long as the glow-worm of pleasure
keeps coming alight in your flesh.

The setting sun eddies on each of your fingernails
before it goes to swell a last mountain of brightness

and I can see by your wrist the steps
your life is taking to reach me.

And then I know that however lost I am inside of myself, as long as he doesn't let me go, I am never alone.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:50 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 1244 words, total size 6 kb.