Pastoral
Nothing here is ever done;
Every motion is so slow,
As the pendulum of waning sun
Damps the evening to Cointreau;
The front door pauses
(Think Madame Tussaud’s)
Until its groaning causes
The very earth to close,
As the elevator, in no hurry
For its own laggard door,
Sails to worlds past all worry
On the sleeping upper floor,
Like that crumbling rental dory
We punted long ago
Through the blazing morning glory
Beneath demoralized châteaux,
Where sun still crawls through tunnels,
Where still the gardens laze,
And the plodding river funnels
All of heaven into haze:
May the lapping, fragile Braille
Of those ancient currents coat us
When, years from now, we fail,
From grief, from life, to notice.
June 20, 2008, Rue de Varenne
Explanation
I was thinking of the time Cathy and I paddled down the river at Brantôme in the Dordogne, a kind of “all in the summer afternoon” moment, and thinking, may the memory preserve us from the pressure of our current life. I wrote this in Paris our last full day there at 24, rue de Varenne, during a very stressful day of conference calls, a lunch, a dinner, piano tuners trying to rescue the piano from the last piano tuner, an insane neighbor complaining about the piano. It was for me bittersweet. I found it hard to leave Paris, but we knew the piano would appreciate the amenable mountains and woods around it in Colorado, so we were driven to a better world.