(an unfinished poem)
High on a prodigal May hill,
buffed brown castle walls
rising above the Neckar...
in Heidelberg, the first taste of love
devastating as the ruined stone
(stately with grandeur, and
a thousand dreams)
of fairy tales more Grimm
than real -- the white pulse
of German wine:
beating...
the haunting Lilli Marlene.
Along the Seine, in September
where Lautrec roamed Montmarte,
in the stark rain our hotel
still has no name, and
a triangular shape...
we hear the sound of the paint,
the footsteps quiet in the stolen dark
more red than white...
as if alone or together
we will always whisper:
"Helen -- Paris..."
sipping at the waning glass,
frightened by the impossible light.
An arrow through the heart.
And never at the right time.
Though the reasons know better than we;
and the candle still burns our fingers.
Share
Print
Save
Follow
Poem was oddly written just one month before I found out she had died six years earlier. We had not seen each other nor had contact since 1970, but the memory was always a haunting one: some good, some horrid, but definitely ingrained into the soul. Poem was a reflection of the memory and continued haunting.
We, of course, had separated and gone to other lives... but never fully the same after, nor would be. Our affair was first consummated in Heidelberg; we later had a stolen weekend in Paris. Still, even then, we knew it was "doomed" from the start; she was older, had three children, and I was a pauper. (And still am. But have moved on to other considerations of love and loving. Never touched another woman again, nor desired to. I am now 73 and still alone.) 12-2016.
Axilea
very Noir I feel, regretful too. It shares that sense of loss your other poems exude, and as with the others I find I have to work to piece it together, which I enjoy doing when the individual pieces are so pretty and sound so good. Like the way you separate "taste of love / devastating" and "the white pulse / of German wine" -- very evocative.
Maybe you don't mean for your reader to do so at all, but I still, after reading it five or six times, am left with more atmosphere and mood than concrete story, and strong hints of failure/rejection/loss: "An arrow through the heart", and "the candle still burns our fingers", without knowing whether this was a brief affair or a long and deep relationship (I suspect the latter). I don't mind this really, since I enjoy the images that build the mood.
I'm not sure the poem needs "(stately with grandeur, and / a thousand dreams)", since to me the sentence these lines interrupt seems stronger without it. Also "more Grimm / than real" strikes me as illogical, because the grittiness of the original Grimm Maerchen had a reality to them that the Disney and other more modernized versions cannot match, so the Grimmer, the realer, if you follow me, considering we're talking about fairy tales here.
And it's just hit me that "Helen -- Paris" is a clue to adultery/theft and disaster. See how slow your readers can be!
"sipping at the waning glass" seems to sum the poem up somehow, as if the writing of it empties the impulse to do so, as if bringing the event and its surrounding feelings out into the "impossible light" has tarnished or lessened its original magic.
Good stuff Rick!