The Hotel Moliere
In France television imitates the opera
At the speed of sound such a tangle of language is simply music
La la la la la pourquoi pourquoi?
And the cool cats echo the birds
Fatty the white one (as much France as any feline born) eyes
An avian feast singing in the trees
While the dogs deliver their ubiquitous shit
It’s easy to believe the pets mock my colonial English, my poorly draped scarf
But when I sit in the centre ville that’s what it is,
History and its buildings turning toward the moment I lift le café to my lips
In this place where all but the Americans sit to drink coffee
I feel I have become what I imagined I should be
When I believed humiliation was avoidable
The French serve to remind me that everyone is an ass
But in Paris it’s almost possible to breathe through the nausea
Through the facts of my miserable marriage
Perhaps it’s the architecture or it’s Moliere
For what else can be done?
That is the lesson of France
Where the sad head of the slaughtered chicken curls around the torso we will later roast
Comic in its angles, that head
Makes short work of the prettified versions of supper I serve my children
Consider what the French have survived
The guillotine, the Corsican, Nazis, McDonald’s
My operatic marriage can hardly be more tragic
Than the countless catastrophes of history that have been visited upon this country
My story hardly more hackneyed than the poorly dubbed American crime drama that sings
And in this small room the cat and dog and birds truly have no attention for me
I am just one more chattering creature
Anyway I could see her going crazy in some faint way
But wanted so much to pack up our troubles in my old kit bag
To go where no man had gone before
I was and am a spectacle of desire for approval
So unlike the querulous French
Who show no pity
Posted By: NJ Cullen
