"Saint-Cloud."
If the ghosts lose, who remembers
on Friday, 13 October, 1870, at the end
of a forest, an ancient distance in which Catherine de Medici is
still winding her way over the Alps?
Bought by her banker in the late 1500s, a mere village,
who took an aster each afternoon and scratched in the lacquer
"here lies".
Aloft, a sister city, and outskirts by Atget,
photographed 1924.
Pale in shelter, the eyes have their houses incised,
and to everything, it's lightning rod and watershed.
It's parapet in rank advance.
The King was invited to dine, and the King died.
Which wandered from duchy to holy,
which worship, which body is skidding
transparent through timing, grew a center much greater--
and the 15 fountains of Sanctus Clodoaldus,
whose miracles still walk abroad, are now walking.
Oh, history of shudders, a series
of sightings in daylight.
It was Henri III who shocked in a mirror ran into a man
on the end of a knife.
And it was here that the Comte de Sancerre
began his long travels backward, because a saint somewhere left
a roller skate on the stairs.
Here, where Napoleon Bonaparte staged his coup
d'etat, in an orangerie that Napoleon III
destroyed some 50 years later.
To gain a view of several miles, and in between,
all these kings who searched their pockets and look up
asking, why am I dying.
"Meudon."
There's nothing left.
He barely had time to admire, they say.
Recent restorations have shown vandals and war
backing up toward the door.
And the drive a half a mile long along the city's gallop in,
there's a city at the door where there used to be a war.
For here, history can be refused.
Le Nôtre did, for instance, say, the pavilions will never be
finished, and of my stations, and stepped off the train.