This is the place my father loved,
quiet garden in the heart of Paris
enclosed by elegant arcades,
two flower-bordered grass rectangles
stretching longwise from
the central pool with its fountain,
and double rows of pleached lime trees
all the length of each side
making green tunnels,
and birdsong high in the lattice,
with couples and toddlers,
students reading,
a businessman strolling before lunch,
the arcades dark, the shops quiet,
and forgotten
Desmoulins’ revolutionary rant,
and the shouts of gamblers, and more gamblers,
and whores under the arches,
and the ghost of Diderot,
ghost of witty Nerval,
but still,
in apartments above the arcades,
just lingering, the shades of Cocteau and Colette.
In this place that I love
on a morning in early June
I have pulled one of the iron chairs
into the shadow of the lime trees
to watch the yellow-grey light
fall motionless on the lawns,
on the banks of bright flowers,
on the yellow-grey gravel,
while the jet of the fountain
glitters, undisturbing.
Did my father sit here,
remembering also
who circled the fountain,
who passed down the long green tunnels
shaping their reveries . . .
. . . a presence in the mind
fit to receive it,
the mind prepared to accomodate
a pressure, the form of a love.
And five hundred steps away
in the Louvre, I will be offered
by Chardin, a presence:
a pewter pitcher with a metal saucepan,
or a knife on a table under a loaf of bread,
or a ray-fish hung on a grey-brown wall,
a presence in the mind
fit to receive it,
equal to the form of a love
say, love of a place
say, in a late morning hour
of green management
under the lime trees.