[not quite poems, not quite journal entries, meta-factual snapshots of everyday Paris life]
“Some kids were playing football & shouting; others were flinging themselves on top of
huge piles of paper that the wind was beginning to scatter. I thought:
how much like a movie!”
Roland Barthes
bart plantenga
Un Coup de Fleurs
The thorny firm-stemmed women had once entered the church a step at a time in skirts of delirious exploding flora & shimmering seamed stockings. Ready to kill God with regret & desire. But now they, jilted in their forlorn dresses of exhausted blossoms—their aromas spent in thin air—sit around the wobbly cafe table like a bouquet of old toilet brushes in a bucket
- L’Extase of the Soup
At Café L’Auto near Metro station Émile Zola I hear “April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom… under the trees…” & a block or 2 further at the iron gate, I see a little boy looking like a character out of a Tati film as he runs to greet his father, yelling: “La Potage! La Potage! La Potage!” as his father, someone deeply ensconced in what we call his work, smiles ever so slightly. But I have to wonder where else in the world a little boy would be so excited about the soup that was about to be served for dinner.
- Baiser-ball
I don’t know what’s gotten into our heads to play baseball on the Invalides lawn. Maybe it’s the deliriously nice April weather! BW had been begging his dad to send his old leather mitt, which he finally did. BW is batting & I am catching sometimes barehanded near the sunning area—& that may be on purpose—where women in colorful bikinis lie parallel, 1 next to another, doing nothing but absorbing the sun’s rays. The spectacle of us reenacting historical games—the 1969 Mets vs. the early- 60s Yankees—with sensational, histrionic play-by-play draws some of the curious passersby who stop & stare with the kinds of smiles reserved for baffling encounters in lieu of anything better to do. We are stars in our own universe & assume the names we used to know by heart: Mantle, Maris, Bouton; Swoboda, Seaver, Cleon Jones. We carry on until we’re winded & sweat can be wiped from our brows. Enough of exercise & fresh air & showing off for women who are not impressed but we blow a kiss in their general direction anyway on our way to the École Militaire Monoprix where we buy a sack full of bieres blondes, camembert, baguettes & various salty things.
- Elusive Patch de Soleil
The hole in the clouds was exactly the same size as the open grassy area that lies atop Les Halles as if the cloud, sunlight & the Jardin Les Halles were interlocking pieces to a Lego set. The hole in the clouds let through a shaft of sun that precisely covers the entire grassy area. The sunworshippers are mostly exposing their faces aimed in the direction they feel the mid-April sun is coming from, rolling up sleeves, exposing their arms near the large head resting on a hand called “Écoute.” The more fanatical are already stripped down to worship the sun more completely. The problem is that this piece of sun, framed by clouds like a 17th- century painting in an over-wrought gilded frame, is floating discreetly but noticeably to the south & west like a parcel of gold outlined like it would be in paint-by-number painting. As part of the grassy area grows darker with cloud cover, the sunworshippers shift to the south & west, crossing the walkway Allée Louis Aragon (“Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?”) & Allée Blaise Cendrars (“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity &, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal & still love the world.”) finding new benches, new angles, new views in pursuit of that elusive, golden patch of desirable sun. But, like everything, the sun is temporary, fleeting & eventually disappears from the grassy knoll.
- Treasure Chest d’Optique
Me & KR are sometimes étonné by lovers everywhere in the grips of passionate kissing, mid-high, mid-sigh, mid-thigh, standing, sitting, lying, writhing, intertwined or hunched over 1 another on Vespas or otherwise occupying the strangest nooks & bends in statuary. He wants to photograph this ever so much as Doisneau did in his time. We’re walking through a Truffaut set although he is dead & that is sad. I see French parents touch & caress their kids, & when they come of age, they will caress, fondle, & touch each other. KR is so inspired—it is May & everyone is photographing the joyous colors—he is aiming his camera in every direction: Voyeurism, sublimation, or the study of human nature? KR takes photos through his mind’s eye & he tells me exactly what he is seeing as we walk & talk for hours along the Seine, through Montparnasse, to the Faubourg edges of Paris to the northwest. He has a room filled with boxes full of negatives he has never developed.
- Le Pair de Paris
Printemps, Pere Lachaise. “Father, the chair?” I ask as we roam the tombs. SU says don’t step on graves. “We could fall in.” Somewhere between Simone Signoret’s & Jim Morrison’s grave she leans against a collapsing tomb of tin & her heels sink into the earth as we kiss. I lift her off the ground by her petite pains & she wraps her legs around me. & for security she hooks 1 foot in between my thighs, toe of her boot nudging my testicles. Just as she begins to sigh into my heart an old woman pursuing 1 of thousands of cemetery chats happens by. She stops her pursuit, bag of fish parts in hand. “Vas y,” continue she says to her cat, “C’est le temp des jeunes!” It is is indeed the time for youth. & then proceeds to relate a tale of how she too, many years previous—long ago—had made love in this very cemetery. She smiles & continues, hunched over, calling her feline minions.
- Bloom et Blâme
We are in the Bois de Bologne & it feels like the kind of day you might run into Monet or somebody similar. ML is standing right at the edge of the lake. I mean right at the edge. She’s idly tossing the heads of yellow flowers: buttercups, dandelions, stargrass, yellow-eyed grass—into the water. ML is impressed how I know the names. “I used to know all their names.” There are sunfish. The younger fish are still fooled by the flower tops. They dart to the surface to gobble them up & then spit them out in retreat. The older ones don’t bother. She’s standing really close to the water’s edge, the toes of her fashionable sandals getting muddy. “Why are men so fucked up?” She asks MB. She never says “fuck”, is always clean, unmoved by erotica; dirt just doesn’t stick to her. Always smells like she’s been rolling in a meadow. “I have to break it off.” She threw more flower heads into the water. She means with GT, her boyfriend & our friend—& patron. GT reads our writing & buys us wine & lunch, dreaming of when he becomes rich—he’s the heir to something in Tuscany, he says—he will do right by me & MEB. He vows with fist across heart to publish all of our work in hardcover… “He has knocked me to the floor. He blames me for the things he cannot do in bed.”
author photo by Audrey X
book available @ Sensitive Skin – https://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/books/paris-scratch-bart-plantenga/
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