ALONE IN PARIS | SUSAN ANDERSON


On Mary’s Day In August

        Tonight it visits me again as if for the first time. I am standing on the Pont St. Louis in the early ’70s with the river beneath while the barges like black swans glide under my feet and the students returning in August, laughing and talking, walk fast around me, puffing smoke and words. In the distance sits Notre Dame, her spider legs lit by the rising moon.
        Later on, a concert to celebrate Mary’s Day in St. Germain-des-Prés. Even now in memory, swelling chords intersperse with the soft voices of an a cappella choir. In between, silence punctured by echoing wooden sounds, seconds before another triumphant peal fills us with thick romantic sweetness. A concert of flowers and stones.
        The organist bows at the end, low over the railing high above the pews in the Paris dark, a thin beam of light rimming his head. As he bends, I suddenly remember another organist’s bow, this one in Venice a year to the day, marveling then how far, but not far at all, the earth had traveled in a year’s turning.
Afterward, outside, I see the French happiness of the crowd disappearing into the late summer night already crunched with leaves.
        And memory holds the organ’s spent sound and those deep twin bows from someplace distant and high, holds them while I hear the flowers and the stones once more and feel again what it is to be young with loss and alone in Paris, wondering now why this time, after so many turnings, we did not see it coming.

Pont Alexandre III

        I still have the picture of you taken on the Pont Alexandre III long before we met, your favorite bridge you told me once when we were there together, lovers walking on the banks of the Seine, with the river churning alongside and Notre Dame above us, its ivy walls lit by an aching moon.
        You know the photo I mean, the black and white gone brown, a little dog-eared at the edges, but unlike you, still here, taken right after the war, you in civilian clothes once again, your gabardine coat all new and flying in the wind and your hair filled with the blowing and giving you wings.
        So you climbed up a lamppost and when you turned toward the camera and smiled, they snapped you. Now you are forever nineteen and in Paris, with your teeth white and straight and your stomach flat and the world newborn amid the rubble of war — walls of apartment buildings and universities and municipal grounds and churches and stores cracked or tumbled by tanks or riddled with bullet holes and grenades lying unexploded in the streets where dogs peed and children played. Yet life throbbed with a vibrant shimmering, you told me. No more bread lines or guns.
        People made love and filled cafés and drank wine and more wine and toasted the Liberation and danced and somehow got enough petrol to fill the tanks of a few rusted Deux Chevaux that choked and sputtered and belched down tree-lined boulevards. Then everyone went back to living and loving and making babies and raising families and painters filled large canvases with exuberant strokes, putting down swaths of cerulean or ultramarine deep to create sky, their brushes dripping with cadmium orange to make a sunset or squeezing out naples yellow from a tube into little stars while Piaf sang her elegiac throatiness to the world and sailors took full-breasted beauties into their arms for one last hungry embrace.
        And so we come around to ‘one’ and ‘last’ and ‘hungry,’ and my questions remain: if I stare long enough and hard enough and right enough at the photo of your everlasting splendor, can I hear your heldentenor laugh again, can there just be, please, a little more more?

Maria On The Moon

        I first saw her years ago in St. Sulpice, hunched over her cane and walking down a side aisle. Ancient then she was, a beldam with black armband, the craters beneath her cheeks like maria on the moon.
        Tonight she appears from nowhere, uninvited and alone, swimming up through the fissures of my brain, at first a faint speck, her straw hat slowly coming into view. Stepping through a square of thin yellow light canting from someplace high above, she labors on her way, pausing near my pew for breath.    She clutches purse and gloves in one bony and transparent hand, illuminated from within. I smell wet wool and insistent French mustiness as she passes: shuffle, tap, shuffle. Then she turns and walks back toward me: shuffle, tap, shuffle. For an instant she fixes me with her eternal eyes. And pointing a crooked finger toward the high altar sitting in the distance like a birthday cake with flaming candles, she mutters something indistinct, a whisper into the incense. When I puzzle up at her, she shrugs skeletal shoulders and moves on, echoing into the dark: shuffle, tap, shuffle; shuffle, tap, shuffle.
        And I wonder now who she is and and what she seeks and where she is going. Is she moving toward the rose window? And why is she here again and did she ever laugh and did she ever love and most of all, what were her words, this specter from the nineteenth century, this ghost of myself bequeathing me lunar craters of my own.
        But I stop. For the organ begins to sound a faint hum of anticipated glory, hums and echoes back into the stillness and the dust: shuffle, tap, shuffle; shuffle, tap, shuffle.



Susan Anderson is a mother, a grandmother, a widow, and a writer who lives in Allentown, New Jersey.
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COMMENTARY | POETRY | FICTION | SUMMER 2008  
THE BOBOLINIS
 S.L. WISENBERG

HARD
JOHN M. ANDERSON

SEICHE
JOSEPH DROGOS

PARABLE OF SENSITIVE SKIN 
MEG FRANKLIN

ALONE IN PARIS
SUSAN ANDERSON

BEGINNINGS
EDWARD MC WHINNEY

SEAMUS, THEN
J.M. PATRICK

WILL DEIRDRE BEAT THE ODDS?
A.S. KING

INSTEAD OF WHAT WE COULD HAVE SAID
VINCENT REUSCH


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