If ever I should go again to Paris,
I hope that I can be there in the spring.
They say April is the time of year
When love pervades the atmosphere.
Couples stroll along the Seine,
Arm in arm or hand in hand,
They browse quaint bookstalls on the quay
And share a kiss along the way.
Perhaps they'll find a quiet nook
Where they can sit, sip wine, and look
Into each other's eyes and keep the world at bay.
For Paris captures in its spell
Those young messieurs and mesdemoiselles
Who find romance a many-splendored thing.
Where love's hopes and dreams survive and thrive,
Old hearts may even come alive
In that magic place that's Paris in the spring.
It isn't just the wonders of the world
that dominate my mind and memory.
Sometimes it is the trifles that cement
in me that dawning consciousness that
makes me suddenly aware, "I'm really here!
I've stumbled on that rare completion
of a dream I only dared to think about."
Of this old globe no other part
retains its power to capture me
so well as one exciting synthesis
of light, of tower and of art.
However it's the unspectacular
that moves me most of all.
I've seen magnificence in Rotterdam,
Brussels, Munich and New York--
all wonderful, and yet it was
the transient things
that framed a city for me then
some fifty years ago. They would again
if they remain today: those little
bookstalls along the Seine.
~
Select your heroes carefully, she said.
Within her studio was Boulanger,
bookstalls by the Seine,
and Canterbury where her art
took on the patina of evensong.
I made of her the heroine apart,
feared her brittle tenderness,
and though she must have known,
I also feared her love.
The fear was in my fingers, too;
her piano could not sing for me.
I even feared her patience,
for she had no need to dramatize
that chasm in between her chair
and my disgrace.
Now forty years since her last breath,
She still transports me there,
and makes of it Elysium
wherein perfection lies,
where newfound wisdom listens
to the stillness teaching.
I see inside that studio,
a charter ship festooned
in fading portraits, musty scores,
and bound for shores where poplars chant
in whispers that I never heard before.
~