Seven Winters in Paris

Thomas McCarthy

'But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third.'
Hemingway A Moveable Feast
I
Vuillard's hospitable and gifted portraits: their eyes, passport-less,
wandering from conte to conte.
II
There was no Thomas MacGreevy waiting with a stroke of orange in his morning-dress, but undiplomatic Paris;
fireflies on the rosewood spinet.
III
The bicycles go by in trees and trees through the dusk of the Invalides.
Raising love-dust, bicycles become leaves Marguerite Yourcenar is dead.
IV
Two referenda lost, we took the inner seats and flew to Paris through wind and sleet.
V
Should we go now, to spread the Gospel of poems, ten Metro tickets surviving
in your purse. For Garret Parnell is dead.
VI
To embrace you, like the Orly security-man: ah! Irlandaise! Your body
is the accent I uncover and uncover.
VII
I am in the Metro beside you thinking of you faraway in the Metro -
for you have slipped away into a paperback. VIII
You standing in front of the grey fresco of Picasso's workshop -
wearing the talisman of a barely pink scarf, red rag to a bull.
XXV
The bicycles speed past Picasso's studio: horses on their way, pedalling, to see
the thoroughbreds of M. De1acroix. XXVI
I beat a retreat from St. Jean Perse; his first editions beyond our reach sycamore leaves litter the shop-front like tunic fragments at Austerlitz. XXVII
Here's the ghost of Ezra Pound, maestro, tulip-eater,
lost in Arthur Waley and never found. XXVIII
In the lIe de la Cite we meet Denis Devlin, a polite ghost, remember?
'I hear the poets have lost their marbles, and the Dail has burned Parnell's heart.'
'Yes, sir. And they were supposed to eat it.'