Today's poem
Like seeing Éric Rohmer's film...
A Room at the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires, 1971
by Matthew Gregory
Madame likes to air the double she takes for eight weeks
on the sea-facing east wing.
She has written twelve postcards to Brussels in a month.
Her tone ー La mer est jolie ー is light and blasé though
she counts six instances of the word
ténèbres.
Arthritis has touched her best hand. Outside the sea
glances her way with distance
where once everything in the world was a man
asking her to dance.
On one shelf in ribbons, her empty hatbox deepens
into deeper hatboxes that collapse slowly
into the green pinochle halls
of the pinochle men she knew.
Madame dreams in the window chair
and sees her postcards
from the Roches Noires
fly lightly down
over the swathe of sea
from the undercarriage
of an albatross.
The ocean bird migrating but so everything seems
at this point
the cad with a tall white grin
throwing double sixes at midnight
fresh oysters with their slight cologne
in the backseats of young France
The concierge is calling her
ーMadame. Madame?
And old albatross the scuffed white of lobby magazines.
An old albatross, but content as she wanders off the edge
of the continent.
(from the website of Vol. 35 No. 5, March 2013, the London Review of Book)
Like seeing Éric Rohmer's film...
A Room at the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires, 1971
by Matthew Gregory
Madame likes to air the double she takes for eight weeks
on the sea-facing east wing.
She has written twelve postcards to Brussels in a month.
Her tone ー La mer est jolie ー is light and blasé though
she counts six instances of the word
ténèbres.
Arthritis has touched her best hand. Outside the sea
glances her way with distance
where once everything in the world was a man
asking her to dance.
On one shelf in ribbons, her empty hatbox deepens
into deeper hatboxes that collapse slowly
into the green pinochle halls
of the pinochle men she knew.
Madame dreams in the window chair
and sees her postcards
from the Roches Noires
fly lightly down
over the swathe of sea
from the undercarriage
of an albatross.
The ocean bird migrating but so everything seems
at this point
the cad with a tall white grin
throwing double sixes at midnight
fresh oysters with their slight cologne
in the backseats of young France
The concierge is calling her
ーMadame. Madame?
And old albatross the scuffed white of lobby magazines.
An old albatross, but content as she wanders off the edge
of the continent.
(from the website of Vol. 35 No. 5, March 2013, the London Review of Book)