Beauty can pierce one like a pain.
—Mann1
Fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings
that gather around a new name.
—Rilke2
i. Le Chabanais,
12 rue Chabanais
Paris fell to Hitler then, but I never did, not for him—
sauntering down the corridor, ’couldn’t walk past a mirror
without seducing it, fairest though he seemed, always wanting
to be my husband, ’just wasn’t having it, there were far more
impressive specimens breathing out fire, looking back at me
whenever heat needed a reason to believe, the devil
himself frosting dark glasses just to receive my heart’s icy
reprieve, pouring in mischief, lapping up its liquor until
history favoured victims, until I took over and wrote
my own chronicle, boulevards of stolen jaguars alarmed
against his pilfering, this clueless, silver suitor my soul
dimmed its shine for, to impress him, igniting me, he’d been warned
not to dull razors, boring me, he never once came or faced
people without pulling my patience off its frame, what a waste.
ii. Le Sphinx,
31 boulevard Edgar-Quinet
Winter wandered in when nationalism blanketed lions
with fur lifted from a lie, truth too human skinned for terror
in sight of civilization, the future dying silent
couldn’t take snow’s test pattern blindness, witnesses with tapers
curling up like burning paper, writing off their injuries
in lightning stolen with swollen palms and arms so primeval
waxing so Promethean, taking down heaven, so to speak
making the statement that famous men will remain mythical
until we throw off smothering faith and take a leap tonight
down from lofty altars, leaving our Egos as offering
facing ocean depths, looking toward our Selves, our lives the rite
and your devotion to me that for which I’m praying, my words
singing seas of Telemachies, sons setting up soundstages—
scenes crews dig deep, shooting secrets we’ll keep, pretty but nameless.
iii. Le One-Two-Two,
122 rue de Provence
Beauty can pierce one moment like a pain, making permanent
stigmatic tragedy—static freedom of pre-dawn colours
burned into hand and foot, stained glass miracles perverted skin
can’t handle, not unless it looks and lasts longer and better
than forever, immortality contains infinities
no one can ever fully encounter unless they travel
beyond reality’s ritual, since personality
and persona differ: one assumed, the other ancestral
and hurt’s only a metric, a measure of a heart whose life
never cheated death, but beat its march, arriving here unharmed
and I’ve faced its art, glancing upon its mouth’s breathless divide
too dark to go in, too bright to let its tongue inside the warmth
of my wide, fevered mind, but in Paris I spied him, death’s great
grandson, asking if my misunderstanding was his mistake.
__________
1Thomas Mann, “Part Eleven: Chapter II”, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter in the second of two volumes comprising, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, New York: The Modern Library, 1924; page 305. Written during 1897–1900 and first published as, “Elfter Teil: Zweites Kapitel”, in the second of two volumes comprising, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie [Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family], Berlin: S. Fischer, 1901; page 455: “Da hatte ihn ein Anfall jener gänzlichen Verzagtheit überwältigt, die er so wohl kannte. Er hatte wieder empfunden, wie wehe die Schönheit tut, wie tief sie in Scham und sehnsüchtige Verzweiflung stürzt und doch auch den Mut und die Tauglichkeit zum gemeinen Leben verzehrt [sic].”
2Rainer Maria Rilke, “First Part”, translated from the German and edited by Stephen Mitchell, with an introduction by Robert Hass, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, New York: Vintage, 1982; page 308. Written in 1902 and first published as, “Erster Teil” in Meister der Skulptur: Auguste Rodin [Masters of Sculpture: Auguste Rodin], Berlin: Brandus’scher, 1903; originally published in a first edition featuring Constantin Meunier by Karl Scheffler, page 1: “Denn Ruhm ist schliesslich nur der Inbegriff aller Missverständnisse, die sich um einen neuen Namen sammeln [sic].”
