All right.
I'm going to move from prose now, poetic
and otherwise, to poems.
The old fashioned kind with lines.
The first is titled "La somme des choses".
And fortunately, there's an epigraph to explain it there.
"La somme des choses", a French school term
referring to a whole field of study
that traces civilization's progress from stuff to things.
Just love that.
That's from an essay by Adam Gopnik,
whose book Paris to the Moon you should read if you haven't.
It's wonderful, it's funny, it's moving and smart.
He lived in Paris for a number of years with a young family
and wrote these fabulous essays, many of which
were published in New York.
And this was in one of them.
"La somme des choses."
"With our help, stuff is always getting made into things.
Wet filaments from Chinese worms,
that the worms have spun into pellets.
Nimble fingers untangle and weave
into shimmering shirts for men to wear on Saturday nights.
Rough minuscule bits of silica, heated hundreds
of degrees with alkali, liquefy, growing transparent.
Then we roll it flat into windows.
We're blowing through tubes, sweating Venetians
make it into vases shaped like summer squash for the display
of tulips or chrysanthemums.
The French, in their schools for children,
are inclined to spend whole days tracing such civilizing
advances, which is why they are recognized worldwide
for lovemaking expertise.
The stuff of our erotic selves, they've mapped for centuries.
The fragrance is rising from the factories,
just beneath our skins.
Our skin's subtle conversation with heat and cool and breeze.
The tiny sounds of pleasure, the umfs and the chants.
And even those quick, back of the throat, piglet [GRUNTS]
Our bodies' musical chambers spontaneously emit.
Not to mention, flare of nose, gape of mouth
and the entire genome of the eyes in constant intentions.
The stuff which draws us onward to the hand's brush
of the thigh or knee under a cafe table.
The balletic curbside leap to open a taxi door.
Those countless things that make us look ridiculous.
Hearts hammering, words stumbling,
over imaginary pavement cracks.
Not so the French, of course.
Who in matter conduct themselves through desires subterranean
mazes with no apparent effort.
Should we observe French lovers in their seductions
as we do summer clouds at our leisure,
guessing at shapes while lying on our backs in the grass,
We'd see first the graceful curve of a Saharan dune,
then the web would have swan, then
a jolly, modern tugboat hauling half the sky westward
to the horizon.
Nothing resembling the royal of human displacement the rest
of us feel.
Like trout who leapt from the comfort of the river
to the pebbled shore, we jerk and sputter.
We leave scaly flecks of ourselves
in the dirt, which is why we save
our drachmas, our yen, our rubles, our pounds,
our dollars, even our lire that we
might travel to Paris or Provence
at least once in our lifetimes.
We're holding the hand of someone,
interlacing with the body of someone
on impeccable French sheets.
Or eye to eye across a tablecloth
littered with bread crumbs and red stains
while mumbling the few words we've learned from guidebooks.
We might feel we've gained, if only for a moment, the thing
we desire most before slipping into eternity,
that last thing."