CHRISTOPHER BARNES
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THE FAMILY BEAUNIER
Cock-a-doodle-do the pale sun.
One and one and one
the arrondissement's Lost Tribe exotics queue.
Square one's a cameo of Boulevard Raspail.
Let us go...
Not a cock-a-hoop day, no Degas.
A shuffle of misput evacuees
shooed-off, mooching to law courts.
They crumple papers
flickering grit under leather soles
- I misremember the echo of feet.
Square one's a cameo of Boulevard Raspail.
Let us go...
I am not yet born.
We're leftovers
in the rough-sketch outlines of a circle.
Mama's a voice
tu-whit-tu-whoo tu-whit-tu-whoo,
spiked heels stabbing.
She shudders,
looks to a vim-on-mould horizon,
refocuses,
counting soldierly security checks.
Square one's a cameo of Boulevard Raspail.
Let us go...
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WOMB-WALKING
Think of a small isolated Carmelite Monastery.
I have not yet heard the humming of trees
the baa nor the moo
nor the croaks at the river's edge.
It seems
she read the squeamish by-lines,
plagues of bombs flopped into hospitals.
She thinks of a small isolated Carmelite monastery.
There is a tremble in her pulse.
Scaredy-cat scaredy-cat Mama is a scaredy-cat.
She expected the benificent stork today.
I jangle with the ding-dong-boom
of Notre Dame bells then nap.
She relives it, years later.
We think of a small isolated Carmelite monastery.
In the heat of Jehovah
tomorrow I will bow out of this tight-to-the-touch place
and plunge yammering into the world.
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AFTER RABI PANELOUX'S READING OF THE TORAH
At the eye of the hurricane
a loudspeaker van slings flames
foaming with run-amok yellow
a finger's breadth from the obelisk.
A Rodin chunk is gravity.
Morning. Papa's star-watching the astral grey.
Front stage the when
and the where of Avenue de Villiers
beset with perils.
It has teetered his vegetating centre.
He mouths misgivings to the dray horse
- blackshirts and communists pummel
while Mobile Guards at the intercrossing
discipline fire-flash rifles.
After Rabi Paneloux's reading of the Torach
to scream, to whimper 'hush'?
Water-sprayers
topple a swirl of red flags;
he closes his ears to the rapid shots
and flaters 'bonjour'
to Mme. de Mille at the telephone exchange.
She booms that Mama has begotten me,
a white-pink boy
trembly and blue-eyed.
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THE PROUD FATHER
Papa thinks to himself
in le cafe Del a Molineux...
in France we have only one world for the different varieties of love.
'O Dinah, Dinah, my chapter and verse wife
pin-up gentile with flaxen hair,
pregnant yesterday
with a depth too heavy to stomach
and a glow.'
He worries for us all.
In France we have only one word for the different varieties of love.
Novels in the embers. 'The courtyard's ash,
we cringe
at the gung-ho goosesteps, the jump in line,
longing for a quickening of knots
over the North Sea.'
The bundle, Jacques, is born,
hope is now necessary.
In France we only have one word for the different varieties of love.
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WHEN PAPA SLEEPS, EVERY NIGHT THE SAME DREAM...
it spurts along an ebony piano, tailbacking
to the Palace of Electricity,
a listening post of clear bulbs,
voltage wires and sockets.
A houseproud pod
floodlit face-to-face with night
in the splash of the Paris Exposition.
The overture debases a fancy-led ballroom,
number work strutting over a herringbone floor.
Preliminaries - silk slippers waltzing
into the burdonsome hobnails of factory workers.
A clodhop surge of peasant conscripts,
unfathomable coloured nasturtiums
in the nostrils of rifle magazines.
Then there's the rumbling of Maxims
the diabolical paring of a shovel,
six hundred rounds a minute,
potholes in the earth's crust.
Here there is sometimes a whimper.
Auxiliaries with pistols
bulging the low ebbs of waves
of death-bringing gases.
Comerades putrify on duckboards,
half-clothed sandbags,
blood and bits on the firestep.
Skulls, hair, torsos
beat flat by mortars.
Pieces of Alan oozing off the trees.
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RUE DU COQ D'OR, PARIS
Seven in the morning.
In her confinement
this feather bed cows.
Lurking mildew and soot
hassles her bronchus.
Damp, tinker's pot black
streams down the window wall.
She's sensate,
radioluminescence at the glass
from sore red sun,
and gaunt, frail to the bones.
Rue Du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.
Her spick-and-span elf-boy sleeps
on the twists of the mattress.
Tomorrow she'll grapple laundry
foisting on a sturdy bloom.