Come look at the girls, said Edward
from the window, rue Gît-le-Coeur.
We ran to look.
Stories down, some black queens
stood shrieking in the street. Then
the burble of Paul's tolerant chuckle
accompanied their disfigured joy; then
two Arab boys drifting through the flat
as through remembered desert, it was
as dry almost, as dusty as that.
At noon another --- ex-student of
the medical fac --- could be seen
waking in a farther room: some
swarthy figurine washed up among
the dingy rivulets of a sheet,
rubbing sleep-sand from his eyes
with fragile dirty fists.
Half old pasha, half mamma,
Edouard pottered in a tattery robe,
emptied ashtrays, vaguely dishragged
a table, childlike handed 'round
bits of Dada curios in polyglot,
clippings, photos, collages of
outmoded monsters, broken, twisted limbs.
Someone said it made him think
of shreds of Greeks hanging, heaped
in the cyclops' cloaca-eye-and-maw,
the roaring cave's dark doorway. Speaking
of Greeks, Paul, tamping his pipe
with a scorched thumb and puffing, explained
about the war between the gods of earth,
the gods of air, the former smoldering,
blasphemous, full of spite, the latter
quick, arrogant, deceitful, thundering.
Was this place a pinnacle or hell?
Babel, perhaps. Hell on high.
Now we could smell the darkness in our light.
At two, the psychoanalyst from Łódz
came in, years and years out of Auschwitz,
a neo-nihilist loaded with matches
from the holocaust. Little flames
leaped from his coat, from everywhere
about him, his eyes gleamed, his forest hands
rubbed cracklingly together and he laughed,
certain that nothingness would be
preceded by fire, and every brilliant
horror have its utterly dark sabbath.
In that faith, he glanced around the room
and rested.