Since 52 B.C., the inhabitants of France
and Western Europe have forgotten who they once were.
Jean Markale
1.
“Café Corbeau.”
“This is Karl Wisent.”
“Karl, where have you been? I thought you had deserted us for ever.”
“Never, Felix.”
“I got married and. . . .”
“Married!”
“Yes, I know that I said that after the first, after Heike, I would never marry again, but I did.”
“A French girl?”
“No, another German. She is an artist.”
“She lives in Paris?”
“Another Berlin girl, actually a friend or a client of my ex-wife. So I have been traveling between Berlin and Paris but she has moved here and we found an atelier near the Place des Vosges.”
“Good.”
“Listen, a friend of mine has just published a new book, his second actually, and it is getting very good reviews. I wanted to give him a little dinner party tomorrow night. Do you think that you could accommodate us? There will be five people.”
“What time, mon copain?”
“Eight.”
“Of course. Would you like something special?”
“No, your menu is perfect.”
“What is your friend’s name?”
“Vogel, Paul Vogel.”
“Bien sûr, I saw him on Livre last night.”
“That’s him.”
“Tomorrow night at eight, five people. I look forward to seeing you Karl.”
“And you Felix.”
2.
A November wind blew dead leaves in a circle, a miniature whirlwind on the sidewalk in front of the Café Corbeau. Felix Beinix, perched upon a steel and leather stool behind his copper bar, worked on his bills. It was three thirty in the afternoon, the slowest part of the day. The kitchen shut down at two thirty and Guillermo, the day chef left at three.
Marie-France placed linen cloths on the tables, preparing the dining room for the evening dinner crowd and Mathieu Poublan, a seventy five year old retired school teacher, sat at the end of the bar reading his newspaper and smoking a Gauloise.
Mathieu had been a friend of Felix’s father and he appeared at the café everyday at ten and spent most of the day there, nursing one or two drinks.
Felix looked up from his bills and observed the park across the street. The falling leaves revealed naked limbs and hundreds of nests.
Seven months before a congress of crows, ravens and rooks had taken up residency at the Place Triangle. Since that time the city had tried several things to rid the Place of the birds but nothing had worked, including the introduction of four hawks into the neighborhood.
The crows reminded him of Branwen.
Seven months ago Felix met Branwen, who came to his café twice in one day, but never appeared again, although she said that she now lived in the neighborhood.
Since meeting her, Felix dreamed of her several times. In the dreams she always appeared as a Celtic warrior, running through an open field, accompanied by wolves and crows and brandishing a great sword.
Marc de la Croix rushed down the sidewalk, the wind tearing at his white trench coat and his long, curly blond hair. He carried a stack of blue examination books under his right arm and a battered brown briefcase in his left hand. He pushed the door open with his foot and uttered an expletive.
“Espresso immediately,” he said throwing his examination books on a table near the window.
Felix stood and started the Italian espresso machine.
“I talked with an old friend of yours today.”
“Who?” asked the Professor as he pulled off his trench coat.
“Karl Wisent.”
“Where has he been?” de la Croix asked, walking toward the bar.
“He remarried. A German.”
“Why couldn’t he find a nice French girl? He could have married my sister. She would have been perfect for him.”
Felix handed de la Croix his espresso and then turned back to his bills. Before he sat back down, he noticed a tall slim man walking through the park, who looked vaguely familiar. He scratched his head trying to recall where he had seen the man and then it struck him. The man was a female version of Branwen.
He walked to the window to observe the stranger. He had thick black hair that parted naturally in the middle and he wore a dark gray overcoat, with a black suit, a dark gray shirt and a black tie underneath.
As he walked underneath the alders, ash and oak trees of the park, he examined the nests and talked to himself. From the expression on his face, he seemed agitated and perturbed and from time to time he kicked out and the fallen leaves whirled about in the wind.
Suddenly he stopped and stared at the café. Felix stepped away from the window, unnerved by the man’s gaze.
The stranger crossed the street at a run and came directly to the café.
Felix pretended to be working when the door opened. He did not look up, as Marie-France greeted the man and he announced he would sit at the bar and have a coffee.
The copper bar was long and would seat twenty people but the man chose to take the seat in front of Felix.
“Café au lait.”
“D’accord,” said Felix, turning to the Italian espresso machine.
“Do you speak English?” asked the man.
Felix tried to place his accent before answering and then he had it; he was Irish.
“A little.”
“Do you live on this bloody Place?”
“Pardon? Bloody?”
“Forget that man. Do you live here? Habitez-vous ici.”
“À Paris?”
“No. Here on this street?”
“Yes.”
“How long have these bloody birds been roosting here?”
“Seven months.”
He looked shocked for a moment and then he asked in a soft voice, “Have you seen her?”
Felix knew he was asking about Branwen but he was not going to volunteer any information to the young man.
“Her?”
“You stupid frog, her-Branwen.”
“Branwen?” he asked, exaggerating his French accent.
“My sister, Branwen O’Roy.”
“Your sister?”
“I am Brandon O’Roy.”
Felix was now curious so he exposed his hand. “I met a French woman named Branwen, not an Irish woman.”
“She speaks frog just like you. Hell, she speaks twelve languages perfectly. She’s a bloody mimic, a chameleon. She blends in wherever she is.”
Felix suspected that he was now talking to himself again.
“When did you see this French Branwen last?”
“Seven months ago.”
“When the bloody birds arrived?”
“Yes.”
“She is so predictable. She’s here. I can smell her.”
He drank his coffee quickly and then without another word, he left.
3.
Felix woke early on Friday. The wind had died down during the night and it was clear and cold. The birds seemed excited or agitated, as they flew about under the trees and then into the air, circling the park, like great black clouds.
Later, when he opened the café he noticed a woman walking out of the park. She wore a long black overcoat, black high heels, black stockings, and a black tailored wool suit. Her long black hair hung loose and tossed behind her in the wind.
Like her brother the day before, Branwen crossed the street and entered the café.
She sat at the bar and ordered a chocolate croissant and a cappuccino.
Felix didn’t know what to say. Should he tell her that a crazy Irishman that looked like her twin had been there the day before asking for her or was her sudden appearance after seven months an indication that she knew that Brandon O’Roy was in town.
“How are you?”
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course. How could I forget you?”
She laughed and pulled her hair back with her right hand. It shone like a raven’s wing.
“I hear that my twin brother has been looking for me.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The crows told me. They know everything that happens on this Place.”
He looked at her to see if she would smile or laugh but she maintained a straight face.
“He was here yesterday.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I had not seen you for seven months.”
“Has it been that long?” she said softly.
“Yes,” he whispered.
She looked into his eyes and he felt he would drown in the blackness of her eyes.
“If he shows up again, tell him to meet me here tonight at ten.” She patted his hand and then turned to her coffee and pastry.
“I have a horrible sweet tooth,” she said with her mouth full.
4.
At five o’clock it began to rain. It was a cold hard rain and people on the street ran for cover. Soon the bar at the café filled up with patrons ordering hot drinks and cognac. As more and more people entered seeking refuge from the sudden rain the café filled with blue cigarette smoke.
Felix and Marie-France scurried about the café and bar, serving drinks and making espressos and cappuccinos. At six the rain stopped and the clouds cleared but the temperature had dropped and the clouds now threatened snow.
At six thirty Brandon walked into the café. His overcoat was buttoned up and he had pulled the collar up for added protection. His cheeks were flushed and red from the cold and upon entering the café he pushed his way to the bar and asked Felix, “So?”
“What?” The people were so loud that Felix was having a hard time hearing.
“Did you see her?” Brandon shouted above the din.
“She will be here tonight.”
Brandon smiled sardonically and turned and pushed through the crowd and out the door. Everyone moaned at the cold that rushed in through the door as he left.
5.
At eight the café was almost empty. Several people had cancelled because of the cold. Felix wore a black V-neck sweater over his usual white cotton shirt and he sat at the bar reading the newspaper. It had been a strange day, he thought.
Two couples entered the restaurant without a reservation and Felix assured them that it was all right tonight. They were locals, people that lived on the Place.
As he was seating the couple he heard the door open and he felt a shock of cold air. A tall thin man, with short white hair and tanned complexion entered. He was wearing an expensive black cashmere overcoat and leather gloves. Felix’s first thought was he was one of the lawyers from the office next door. But then he recognized him; he had seen him the night before being interviewed on Livre by Jacqueline Brevier.
As Laurence helped the man with his coat, Felix noted she held a black wooden cane. Beneath the coat the man wore a black tailored suit, a white shirt and a silk black tie.
Laurence handed him his cane and he moved toward the bar with a slight limp.
Felix hurried to the bar and asked the man if he wanted a drink. The man looked at him directly and Felix noted his large green eyes, prominent nose and high cheekbones. Finally, he said, “champagne.”
Felix opened a split and poured the champagne into a flute and then said, “Santé.”
As the man placed his cane on the bar, Felix observed that it had been carved by hand and that the handle was the head of a wolf.
“You are Monsieur Vogel?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you on television last night.”
“What did you think?”
“I was fascinated by the subject; Georg Löwe was an interesting man.”
“Still is. He is one hundred and five.”
“How is his health?”
“Much better than you would suspect.”
“You wrote a book on Sartre, as well?”
The man smiled and said, “I sold about fifty copies.”
“I intend to buy your books on Sunday. That is the only day that I have off.”
“Let me know if you do and I will come by and sign them for you.”
The door opened and they both shivered as two young women entered. One was tall and dark with short-cropped hair. The other was younger with blonde hair and blue eyes. They were wearing colorful down coats. The dark woman wore a red one and the blonde a blue one.
Vogel turned and said, “Simone, how nice of you to come.”
She walked toward Vogel quickly and stopped him from getting up. “How’s the leg?”
“The same. It will always be this way.”
The other woman asked, “What happened?”
“I was shot a few years ago in Berlin. It’s a long story.”
Simone said, “Monique, Monsieur Vogel is a spy.”
“Non!”
“I wouldn’t use that term Simone. I used to work for the United States government. A young German shot me in Berlin on a night like this.”
Before Monique could ask another question, Karl Wisent and Elise Schlesinger entered. Karl was a large man with dark auburn hair and Felix always thought his name, Wisent, which meant bison, was appropriate for the dour Berliner.
Vogel stood up and leaned on his cane, waiting for Wisent to shake his hand. They greeted each other in German. Elise held back and Felix thought she was shy. She was of medium height with long black hair and green eyes. There was something wolf-like about her and Felix thought of Vogel’s cane.
“Let me show you to your table.”
During the next forty-five minutes the café slowly filled up, mostly with people from the neighborhood who didn’t want to travel far in the cold.
Felix was so busy by nine thirty that he had forgotten about Brandon and Branwen.
He was standing at the bar opening a bottle of Medoc when Branwen entered.
He had reserved a table for two for her in the warmest corner of the restaurant. He left the bottle on the bar and took her coat and handed it to Laurence when she passed on her way to the kitchen, where Robert Levy, the night chef, and his two assistants were working.
As he turned to show her to her table she placed her hands on his shoulder and gave him a kiss on each cheek. Once again he smelled her chocolate perfume and musk and he felt a spasm of desire. Must be the pheromones, he thought.
She ordered the duck and a bottle of the Pomerol and for the next hour, when he had the chance, he stopped at her table to fill her glass or ask if she needed anything.
He noticed Vogel watching her and for a brief moment he felt a twinge of jealousy. The truth, he thought, is that we are both too old for her.
A little after ten Brandon arrived with a whoosh. Before Laurence could get to him he had already taken off his overcoat, slung it across an empty chair at the bar and was striding toward Branwen’s table. He was like a force of nature, thought Felix, intimidated by the man’s vitality and energy.
Felix followed him to the table and poured him a glass of the wine and asked if he wanted to see the menu.
“Steak,” he said, dismissing Felix.
At first the two talked quietly but soon they began to shout. Everyone else in the room stopped talking.
“It’s mine,” she said. “I am here and here I will stay. Go and find yourself another place.”
“But I found this one. I searched and searched and it is mine.”
“No,” she said. “It is impossible. We are here. It is as simple as that. Full stop.”
His face turned a bright red, before he stood and slapped her. Wisent was half way out of his chair, as was several others, but Felix rushed across the room with his hands doubled up into fists. But before he could reach Brandon, the boy had turned and was moving through the tables on his way out.
As he passed Wisent’s table, Vogel stuck his cane between the young man’s long legs and he fell to the floor. The fall stunned everyone, especially Brandon, who immediately began to push himself up. Vogel, however, now stood with the tip of his cane pressed hard onto Brandon’s spine.
“If you move an inch I will sever your spine.”
Vogel then called to Laurence to bring both his, Branwen’s and the young man’s coats.
Wisent asked, “What are you doing?”
Vogel waved his hand and said, “Finish your dinner. I will be right back.”
As soon as Laurence returned with the coats, Vogel backed away from Brandon and let him stand. The young man turned and glared at the older man, while Branwen passed them both, took her coat and hurried to the door.
Felix watched as they crossed the street and disappeared into the shadows of the trees. Fat flakes of snow fell slowly onto the sidewalk.
6.
Snow accumulated under the trees, as Vogel led the way to the center of the park to a wrought iron bench and sat down, where he ordered, “Sit next to me you two.”
Branwen looked at him and then sat to his right but Brandon refused to move.
“I said sit, Brandon.”
Brandon sheepishly looked at him and then sat.
“This is a good place. I can tell it. The memory lines move through here and the sacred memories still live. I understand why Brandon chose it.”
Vogel looked over his shoulder toward the café and added, “It is obvious that Felix’s ancestors knew its worth. That is why they built their homes here. It is really his, this place. But he has forgotten everything. To him it is only a place in his dreams and you woman are only a symbol of desire.”
“We are coming back and I need a place to settle, a place to nest.”
“So like a woman,” Vogel said with a laugh. “And you, if you had not been flying around like a crazy teenager you might have had this place. Have you ever thought that all your wandering is wasteful?”
“Without the wandering I would never have found this place.”
“Isn’t it too close to Notre Dame?”
“No, it is fine,” said Branwen.
Brandon nodded his approval.
“You should share this space. Branwen can develop and nurture it and you can stop here and rest from your travels.”
“Many of our kind have already arrived. Did you notice how many had the old blood in the restaurant?”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“Of course not. You were too busy being a bully.”
“Stop it. Share it and let our brother in on the secret. I am cold and I am going in.”
As he walked away, Branwen called out, “Take care wolf.”
He stopped and turned and whispered, “You take care crow.”
7.
Vogel walked slowly back to the restaurant and stopped before the door. He turned and watched the snow settle onto the trees of the park and he noted the crow nests in the branches of the trees but he could not see the buildings because he was remembering another time. The memory lines sang and vibrated and he heard the whine and screech of the pipes.
Karl opened the door and asked, “ça va?
“Of course, King Bison, of course.”
The End
Monday, October 23, 2006
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
"Cafe Corbeau" by Keith Harvey
Café Corbeau
The pigeon-the hawk-the nez bourbon--table for two-the roost
Felix Beinix awoke to the sound of the green garbage trucks entering the square, known as Place Triangle, an ancient neighborhood located between the Sorbonne on the south and the Seine on the north.
The green trucks were usually the first sound he heard each morning. The second was the city employees hosing down the street, cleaning the detritus from the night before, forcing it into the drains and the sewers and ultimately into the river. The third was Madame Fouchard winding the awnings open over the windows and door of her boulangerie or Monsieur Bleyer opening the automatic metal shutters over the door to his patisserie. The fourth was the sound of the storeowners scrubbing down the sidewalks, washing away pigeon droppings.
It was spring and Beinix’s apartment windows were open and he could hear all these familiar sounds, sounds he had listened to for the last twenty years. Today, however, there was a new sound, one he had not yet gotten use to. It was the sound of a congress of crows, which had decided to make the trees of the park, which occupied the center of the Place Triangle, their roost.
He owned a bar and cafe and the building that housed them on the Place Triangle. The building consisted of five stories with two apartments on each of the four stories above the ground, where the bar and café were situated.
Felix’s father left him the bar and café. When his father died, Felix had been in Southeast Asia, flying a helicopter for the French Navy. No one could remember who was the first Beinix to own the building. It had been passed from father to son for centuries.
The building was constructed of granite and some stonemason had placed a gargoyle on each corner of the building. At one time the building had been called the Corbeau and that name was still carved in the stone above the door, leading into the apartment building.
Felix’s father had named the café/bar-Café Corbeau.
The family believed that when the Beinix family was Celt, they called themselves Corbeau. The Romans, however, made them change their name and they chose Beinix.
He lay quietly, identifying each sound, before he kicked off the covers of the bed and swung his legs to the floor.
He looked at his legs and noted how thin they were and he remembered the muscles he used to have when he was young. He stood up and walked to the bathroom and paused in front of a mirror and examined his nude body. His stomach was flat but his arms and legs seemed thin and frail, although he was not aware of any loss of strength. He was still able to hoist the cases of wine and liquor out of the delivery vans and sweep the bar and mop the floor and polish the copper fittings and clean the mirrors.
There was something birdlike about his body and he often imagined that he was a starling, although he couldn’t sing or fly. It was just a fantasy he had. He tended to see all people as a type of animal.
In addition to his belief that all people were somehow connected to an animal, he agreed with Hemingway that a bar should be a clean well-lit place, where people could sit and read or write over their cognac. He purposely created such a place for such people and, as a result of his plan or fantasy that was usually the type of patrons that visited his place on the Place Triangle.
He shaved his thick black beard carefully with a straight razor and then showered. Later, he walked about his large apartment that was directly above his bar, straightening it up from last night. He was an insomniac and after closing the bar he usually read or watched television and wandered around the apartment. In the morning, he picked up newspapers, glasses, and books, made the bed, watered the plants, fed his two finches, cleaned their cage and then dressed.
He wore the same thing every day- a white cotton shirt that he ironed himself, black woolen slacks, and Italian loafers with a tassel. He combed his thick hair straight back and he examined himself one more time in front of the mirror. He checked the time. It was eight forty five, the time he opened the back door for his two morning employees-Marie-France Rosier and Guillermo de la Peña.
He walked down the narrow wooden steps that led from the hall of the first floor to the back door of the ground floor. The stairs were dark and he descended them slowly. Since he turned fifty he had become concerned about falls. For some reason he felt fragile, although his looks had not really changed in ten years.
The stairs ended in a foyer where there were three doors. One door led to the building’s lobby. Another opened onto the back alley and the third served as the back entrance to the Corbeau. He unlocked the door to the alley and Guillermo immediately pushed against it. Felix jumped back to avoid being hit and the Spaniard entered with a big grin on his face. Felix wondered why he was always happy.
“Hola, Felix, “ said Guillermo pushing past him.
Guillermo was twenty-seven years old, tall and thin, with a week old growth of black stubble on his thin face, and long blue-black hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of American jeans and red tennis shoes. He carried a backpack slung over his right shoulder and when he smiled Felix was always startled by the whiteness of his teeth.
“Ça va? mon copain?” asked Felix.
“Si, Si.”
Guillermo hung his backpack on a peg on the wall of the back hall and then followed Felix to the front, turning on lights as he walked.
Once inside the café, Guillermo turned toward the kitchen, which was behind a long and elegant copper bar, as Felix unlocked the pad locks on the steel shutters that covered the windows and the door of Café Corbeau.
Once the shutters were up, Felix opened the front door and then rolled out the green awning and set up five tables in the front of the restaurant.
Students on their way to school passed by and called out greetings to Felix, while he watched the patrons line up in front of the patisserie next door.
In the small park in the center of the Place, several men sat on wooden benches patiently waiting for Felix to wave them in. These men appeared every morning and would sit and drink cognac as they read their papers and talked politics. Most of them were in their sixties but some were seventy or eighty. They were friends of his father and his grandfather. They were pensioners and widowers and veterans and Felix’s bar and café was their refuge from the loneliness of their lives.
This morning Felix noted that the trees of the park were full of crows. Over the past few weeks, crows, black birds and ravens had decided to make the trees in the Place Triangle into their rookery. Felix felt a strange attraction to them but sometimes their incessant sounds, machine like in their quality and consistency, were annoying. The only bright spot was that, unlike the pigeons, the crows were usually gone by the time he opened the bar and they did not return until the evening.
Some of the people on the Place had complained to the city and several inspectors had appeared and noted the unusual congress of the crows. The city responded by hanging several painted wooden owls from high limbs in the trees but these owls for all their verisimilitude did not seem to have an effect on the birds.
Over the last few weeks Felix suspected that the crows were waiting for something. After all, they had never been there before and he could see no rhyme or reason for their appearance now. Other than several alders, oaks, and ashes in the petite park there was nothing there that would attract a crow.
At eight fifty five, Marie-France appeared on the back of her boyfriend’s BMW. Once upon the curb, she pulled off her black helmet and attached it to the seat of the bike, kissed François on each cheek and then turned to Felix, who she kissed three times.
He looked at his watch and said, “just barely.”
“You know I am never late. It was such a nice morning that we stayed in bed a little longer.” She winked at him.
She had thick curly blonde hair, brown eyes and brown skin. She was short and a little plump. She was his day waitress and she could cover the whole bar and café without breaking a sweat during its busiest times. She wore the same outfit as Felix, a white cotton shirt, black woolen slacks and flat black shoes.
As he followed her into the bar, he smelled fresh coffee brewing and saw that Guillermo had pulled his chef’s hat on and was wearing a white smock with his name initialed on his left breast.
Pierre Londais entered, carrying an armful of baguettes from the boulangerie across the Place. Pierre’s arrival always signaled the workday had started.
At nine thirty, Felix was setting the tables outside when he felt a blow to his shoulder, causing him to fall over a chair and hit his head against the pavement. For a moment he lost consciousness.
When he came to, after only a moment, he discovered Marie-France holding his head in her lap.
“He’s awake,” she said, and several people standing around him expressed their happiness that he was still alive.
“What happened?”
“You were hit on the head by a pigeon.”
“What?"
“A pigeon fell from the sky and hit you.”
To prove her point Mathieu, one of younger pensioners, held a dead pigeon up to his face.
“My God.”
“Can you stand?” asked Marie-France.
“I believe so.”
He stood up carefully and reached behind his head and felt a large knot. He noted that a few drops of blood were on his fingers.
“ Should we get you to a doctor?” asked Mathieu.
“No, I’ll be all right.” He hated doctors and hospitals. “I would rather die than go to a doctor.
Several people helped him inside to the bar, where Guillermo poured him a small glass of cognac.
The pensioners must have thought that his glass of cognac signaled that the bar was open because they followed him in and took up their usual places around the café.
“You might as well start serving them,” he said to Marie-France. “I’ll be all right.”
She examined him closely, trying to decide whether she should believe him or not.
Mathieu put the dead bird next to him on the bar.
At ten o’clock the Corbeau began to fill up with students and teachers from the Sorbonne. One regular, Marc de la Croix, a history professor, who appeared every day, sat at his usual table near the window and ordered a croissant, a cappuccino, and a cognac.
Professor de La Croix was a stocky man in his early forties. He had ruddy cheeks and thick blond hair that cascaded off his round head. He usually wore a brown suit, with a yellow shirt and a paisley bowtie.
When de la Croix entered today he said good morning to Felix as he always did but he paused for a moment and examined the pigeon. He did not ask why the dead bird rested on the bar nor did he comment on the fact that Felix’s shirt was stained with blood. He simply took his usual seat and ordered.
After a while, Felix went up stairs, washed his face, doctored the bump on his head, took an aspirin and changed his shirt. When he returned, the bar was full and he took his place at the door, where he greeted guests, made out their checks and took their money.
He noticed that someone had removed the pigeon.
At noon, a new woman walked through the door. She reminded Felix of the crows in the trees in the Place. She was tall, almost as tall as Felix, with black eyes and long black hair that she had braided. She possessed a nez bourbon, a racial characteristic of the old French aristocracy that Felix found irresistible. She wore a white silk blouse, a black leather mini skirt, and flat shoes. She carried a weathered leather briefcase and she smelled like chocolate and musk.
“Table for two?” she asked.
“Outside or in?”
“Outside, please. In the shade.”
“There was only one table available but it was in the sun. Felix went to the back and brought out a large green umbrella, which he set up in such a way that the table was now in the shade.
He helped her with her seat and as he did he breathed in her perfume and he felt for a moment dizzy.
“May I get you something?”
“A glass of Sauvignon Blanc.”
He hurried inside, poured the glass himself, and took it to her. As he passed Marie-France she gave him a strange look and he simply shrugged.
Mathieu, on his way out, asked, “Did you notice that the pigeon’s breast was ripped out?”
“No.”
“He must have been attacked by one of those hawks that the city has brought in to cut down on the pigeon population.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The city has brought in hundreds of hawks to keep the pigeon population down. It was in Figaro. Of course, there have been several demonstrations at l'Assemblée Nationale on behalf of the pigeons.
As soon as Mathieu left, Felix asked Guillermo, “Where’s the pigeon?”
He looked up from the omelet he was preparing and pointed to the back.
Felix went down the hall to the back door and then into the alley where the large trash containers were. He opened theirs and examined the dead pigeon that lay on top of a pile of potato peels.
Mathieu was right, he thought, the breast of the pigeon had been ripped from its body.
He walked back through the café and out onto the sidewalk, then crossed the street and entered the small park through a black wrought iron fence. Standing under the trees he examined his building. At the top, perched on top of one of the gargoyles was a hawk, the killer of the pigeon.
As he crossed the street he realized that the crows were gone. They must have left while he was unconscious.
As he passed the woman’s table, he asked, “Would you like another glass of wine?”
She looked up from her book and he was struck once again by the blackness of her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Should I remove this place setting?”
“No, my friend is coming. He is always late.”
De la Croix beckoned him to his table.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen her before.”
“She’s a beautiful woman. Look at that nose. She must have Bourbon blood. It is magnificent. You know what Freud would say about that nose?”
“No. But she is attractive. She possesses the old French looks and grace.”
“For men like us, Beinix, that look is irresistible.”
“Men like us?”
“Men with the old Gallic blood.”
As they admired the woman, a tall man, with dark skin and black hair approached her table. He was tall and powerfully built, with hooded eyes and a nose like a hawk’s beak.
He wore leather pants and boots, a red silk shirt, dark glasses, a silver bracelet on each wrist and silver earrings in each ear. When he reached her table he bent down and kissed the woman on each cheek and then pulled out his chair and moved it closer to her.
Felix excused himself and raced Marie-France to their table to ask the man if he wanted something to drink.
The man ordered a cognac and an espresso.
Felix let Marie-France serve them. While he stood behind the bar and watched them, he guessed that they were not lovers because the woman tensed up, when the man kissed her.
The couple ate and then talked for another hour. Sometimes their voices rose and Felix watched them carefully from a distance. He had not been caught in such a snare for a long time. He was trapped by the woman’s looks and smell.
At two thirty the two stood, kissed briefly, and then left. The man walked toward the Sorbonne, while the woman turned and walked into the park. Felix assumed that she would pass through the park and emerge on the other side of the Place and take the short street that led to the Seine.
They closed the kitchen at three and Guillermo left. Marie-France would stay until five, when the evening shift would arrive. Felix cleaned all the tables and then he and Marie-France placed cloth tablecloths on the tables and set them for dinner.
The bar area stayed open all day.
At four thirty Felix returned to his room, undressed and lay down for a two-hour nap. He left the windows open and listened to pigeons cooing on the ledge outside his window.
While he slept he dreamed that the woman in the café came to him and offered him a square bar of peat, which he held in his hands like some sacred object. As she was handing it to him, he smelled her perfume and she leaned toward him and he kissed her on each cheek and he felt excited and safe.
At six thirty his alarm went off and he showered and shaved and then walked downstairs.
Robert Levy, the night chef, stood in the kitchen, talking with Tasco, his assistant, a short, dark Sicilian, and Laurence, the waitress, was standing at the bar listening to Professor de la Croix.
Felix heard him say, “the Keltoi or the hidden people once ruled this land but they were conquered by the Romans and driven out by other tribes. They worshipped their gods in sacred groves and sometimes identified themselves by a tree."
“They had their own calendars and this time of the year would be associated with the alder and the hawk.”
“Why animals and trees?”
“They were close to nature and associated their own qualities with those of the animals and trees around them.”
With his dream still fresh in his mind, Felix asked the Professor, “Do you know what peat is?”
“Of course, it is the early formation of coal. It consists of dead vegetation, insects, sometimes-decaying bodies, waste, and water. It is sometimes used as fuel by people in rural areas.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I had a dream, where a woman handed me a block of peat.”
The professor started to laugh. “I think that I would reassess that relationship.”
“Me, too,” said Laurence.
Felix glared at her and she jumped off the stool and walked to the back. Laurence was short and dark and lithe, the opposite of Marie-France. She moved around the café in a hurry and sometimes Felix imagined that she was a sparrow hopping on a ledge or chasing a worm in the garden.
Felix walked out onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The shops were closed and the sun was setting. The crows were returning to their roost and he watched as they flew in over the roofs of the building on the Place Triangle to join the congress.
Laurence came out to join him and said, “We’re full tonight.”
“Good. When is the first reservation?”
“Seven thirty.”
At eight thirty the café was full and both Laurence and Felix were scurrying about servicing the diners. He was standing on the sidewalk pouring the wine for a table of four sitting under one of his green umbrellas when he heard the sound of a scooter close to him and he turned to see the woman from lunch pulling up to the curb astride a red Italian scooter. She wore a black leather mini skirt, black leather flats, a gray silk blouse, and a red helmet.
Without turning off the engine of the scooter, she called out, “do you have a table for me?”
Felix finished pouring the wine and walked to the curb.
“No, we are full but you could eat at the bar.”
“Perfect,” she said and parked her scooter on the sidewalk near the door of the café.
Later, Felix placed a menu in front of her. There was only six items.
“I would like a glass of red.”
“I have a nice Lalande de Pomerol.”
“That and the rabbit.”
He placed her order with Robert and then poured her a glass of the red.
“My name is Felix.”
‘Yes, I know. I am Branwen.”
“Odd name. An old name.”
“As old as they get, Felix.”
She looked at him with a twinkle in her eye before she took a sip of the wine.
“Nice, quite nice.”
“And your friend, does he have an old name?”
“Yes. His name is Horace and his name and blood are very old.”
“A noble, huh.”
She laughed. “Not French. He is an Egyptian.”
Branwen stayed until eleven thirty and Felix walked her to her scooter afterwards.
“I hope you come back?”
“I am moving back into the neighborhood.”
“Back?”
“I used to live here a long time ago. You know that this Place is one of the few sacred spots left in Paris that someone hasn’t built a Cathedral or a mosque on top of. Ages ago it was a sacred grove and we came here to worship but we forgot but now we have remembered and we are coming back. They are trying to stop us of course but they won’t be able to this time. They are not as strong as the Romans; their blood is mixed and their resolve . . ..” She waved her arm absently as if to dismiss the unnamed people.
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen to your blood, brother starling, and you will figure it out.”
She kissed him on each cheek, then pulled on her red helmet and mounted her scooter.
Felix closed the café at one and trudged up the stairs. He did not turn on the lights of the apartment because he did not want to attract mosquitoes and moths to the lights. He undressed completely and sat in a leather chair overlooking the park and the old trees. He heard the crows in the trees and he saw two bats flying around one of the streetlights. Somewhere near by he heard doves cooing. He could not remember this much wildlife in the Place. Maybe this was what she was talking about; maybe she was talking about the return of the birds.
He fell asleep in the chair and he dreamed about her. She was in a great field, walking toward a grove of trees on a nearby hill. She was completely naked but her body was painted blue and green and she wore a crown of silver filigree and on the crown near her temples there were two tiny silver leaves. As she walked her haired flowed behind her and he heard her say. “We are coming back to the sacred places.” And then he saw in the dream hundreds of crows flying out of the north toward the hill and beneath the crows wolves ran and she led them all.
The next morning he woke early, dressed, and crossed the street to the park, where he noticed that the crows had made hundreds of nests in the trees. The crows were waking and preparing to leave their roost and go about their business for the day. They seemed not to notice him as he walked under the trees.
When he walked out of the park on his way back to the café, he saw a hawk land on the head of one of the gargoyles and take up its place. A flock of pigeons burst into the air upon the arrival of the hawk, circle the Place, and then flew off in the direction of Notre Dame, while Felix thought about his dream and the woman.
The End
The pigeon-the hawk-the nez bourbon--table for two-the roost
Felix Beinix awoke to the sound of the green garbage trucks entering the square, known as Place Triangle, an ancient neighborhood located between the Sorbonne on the south and the Seine on the north.
The green trucks were usually the first sound he heard each morning. The second was the city employees hosing down the street, cleaning the detritus from the night before, forcing it into the drains and the sewers and ultimately into the river. The third was Madame Fouchard winding the awnings open over the windows and door of her boulangerie or Monsieur Bleyer opening the automatic metal shutters over the door to his patisserie. The fourth was the sound of the storeowners scrubbing down the sidewalks, washing away pigeon droppings.
It was spring and Beinix’s apartment windows were open and he could hear all these familiar sounds, sounds he had listened to for the last twenty years. Today, however, there was a new sound, one he had not yet gotten use to. It was the sound of a congress of crows, which had decided to make the trees of the park, which occupied the center of the Place Triangle, their roost.
He owned a bar and cafe and the building that housed them on the Place Triangle. The building consisted of five stories with two apartments on each of the four stories above the ground, where the bar and café were situated.
Felix’s father left him the bar and café. When his father died, Felix had been in Southeast Asia, flying a helicopter for the French Navy. No one could remember who was the first Beinix to own the building. It had been passed from father to son for centuries.
The building was constructed of granite and some stonemason had placed a gargoyle on each corner of the building. At one time the building had been called the Corbeau and that name was still carved in the stone above the door, leading into the apartment building.
Felix’s father had named the café/bar-Café Corbeau.
The family believed that when the Beinix family was Celt, they called themselves Corbeau. The Romans, however, made them change their name and they chose Beinix.
He lay quietly, identifying each sound, before he kicked off the covers of the bed and swung his legs to the floor.
He looked at his legs and noted how thin they were and he remembered the muscles he used to have when he was young. He stood up and walked to the bathroom and paused in front of a mirror and examined his nude body. His stomach was flat but his arms and legs seemed thin and frail, although he was not aware of any loss of strength. He was still able to hoist the cases of wine and liquor out of the delivery vans and sweep the bar and mop the floor and polish the copper fittings and clean the mirrors.
There was something birdlike about his body and he often imagined that he was a starling, although he couldn’t sing or fly. It was just a fantasy he had. He tended to see all people as a type of animal.
In addition to his belief that all people were somehow connected to an animal, he agreed with Hemingway that a bar should be a clean well-lit place, where people could sit and read or write over their cognac. He purposely created such a place for such people and, as a result of his plan or fantasy that was usually the type of patrons that visited his place on the Place Triangle.
He shaved his thick black beard carefully with a straight razor and then showered. Later, he walked about his large apartment that was directly above his bar, straightening it up from last night. He was an insomniac and after closing the bar he usually read or watched television and wandered around the apartment. In the morning, he picked up newspapers, glasses, and books, made the bed, watered the plants, fed his two finches, cleaned their cage and then dressed.
He wore the same thing every day- a white cotton shirt that he ironed himself, black woolen slacks, and Italian loafers with a tassel. He combed his thick hair straight back and he examined himself one more time in front of the mirror. He checked the time. It was eight forty five, the time he opened the back door for his two morning employees-Marie-France Rosier and Guillermo de la Peña.
He walked down the narrow wooden steps that led from the hall of the first floor to the back door of the ground floor. The stairs were dark and he descended them slowly. Since he turned fifty he had become concerned about falls. For some reason he felt fragile, although his looks had not really changed in ten years.
The stairs ended in a foyer where there were three doors. One door led to the building’s lobby. Another opened onto the back alley and the third served as the back entrance to the Corbeau. He unlocked the door to the alley and Guillermo immediately pushed against it. Felix jumped back to avoid being hit and the Spaniard entered with a big grin on his face. Felix wondered why he was always happy.
“Hola, Felix, “ said Guillermo pushing past him.
Guillermo was twenty-seven years old, tall and thin, with a week old growth of black stubble on his thin face, and long blue-black hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of American jeans and red tennis shoes. He carried a backpack slung over his right shoulder and when he smiled Felix was always startled by the whiteness of his teeth.
“Ça va? mon copain?” asked Felix.
“Si, Si.”
Guillermo hung his backpack on a peg on the wall of the back hall and then followed Felix to the front, turning on lights as he walked.
Once inside the café, Guillermo turned toward the kitchen, which was behind a long and elegant copper bar, as Felix unlocked the pad locks on the steel shutters that covered the windows and the door of Café Corbeau.
Once the shutters were up, Felix opened the front door and then rolled out the green awning and set up five tables in the front of the restaurant.
Students on their way to school passed by and called out greetings to Felix, while he watched the patrons line up in front of the patisserie next door.
In the small park in the center of the Place, several men sat on wooden benches patiently waiting for Felix to wave them in. These men appeared every morning and would sit and drink cognac as they read their papers and talked politics. Most of them were in their sixties but some were seventy or eighty. They were friends of his father and his grandfather. They were pensioners and widowers and veterans and Felix’s bar and café was their refuge from the loneliness of their lives.
This morning Felix noted that the trees of the park were full of crows. Over the past few weeks, crows, black birds and ravens had decided to make the trees in the Place Triangle into their rookery. Felix felt a strange attraction to them but sometimes their incessant sounds, machine like in their quality and consistency, were annoying. The only bright spot was that, unlike the pigeons, the crows were usually gone by the time he opened the bar and they did not return until the evening.
Some of the people on the Place had complained to the city and several inspectors had appeared and noted the unusual congress of the crows. The city responded by hanging several painted wooden owls from high limbs in the trees but these owls for all their verisimilitude did not seem to have an effect on the birds.
Over the last few weeks Felix suspected that the crows were waiting for something. After all, they had never been there before and he could see no rhyme or reason for their appearance now. Other than several alders, oaks, and ashes in the petite park there was nothing there that would attract a crow.
At eight fifty five, Marie-France appeared on the back of her boyfriend’s BMW. Once upon the curb, she pulled off her black helmet and attached it to the seat of the bike, kissed François on each cheek and then turned to Felix, who she kissed three times.
He looked at his watch and said, “just barely.”
“You know I am never late. It was such a nice morning that we stayed in bed a little longer.” She winked at him.
She had thick curly blonde hair, brown eyes and brown skin. She was short and a little plump. She was his day waitress and she could cover the whole bar and café without breaking a sweat during its busiest times. She wore the same outfit as Felix, a white cotton shirt, black woolen slacks and flat black shoes.
As he followed her into the bar, he smelled fresh coffee brewing and saw that Guillermo had pulled his chef’s hat on and was wearing a white smock with his name initialed on his left breast.
Pierre Londais entered, carrying an armful of baguettes from the boulangerie across the Place. Pierre’s arrival always signaled the workday had started.
At nine thirty, Felix was setting the tables outside when he felt a blow to his shoulder, causing him to fall over a chair and hit his head against the pavement. For a moment he lost consciousness.
When he came to, after only a moment, he discovered Marie-France holding his head in her lap.
“He’s awake,” she said, and several people standing around him expressed their happiness that he was still alive.
“What happened?”
“You were hit on the head by a pigeon.”
“What?"
“A pigeon fell from the sky and hit you.”
To prove her point Mathieu, one of younger pensioners, held a dead pigeon up to his face.
“My God.”
“Can you stand?” asked Marie-France.
“I believe so.”
He stood up carefully and reached behind his head and felt a large knot. He noted that a few drops of blood were on his fingers.
“ Should we get you to a doctor?” asked Mathieu.
“No, I’ll be all right.” He hated doctors and hospitals. “I would rather die than go to a doctor.
Several people helped him inside to the bar, where Guillermo poured him a small glass of cognac.
The pensioners must have thought that his glass of cognac signaled that the bar was open because they followed him in and took up their usual places around the café.
“You might as well start serving them,” he said to Marie-France. “I’ll be all right.”
She examined him closely, trying to decide whether she should believe him or not.
Mathieu put the dead bird next to him on the bar.
At ten o’clock the Corbeau began to fill up with students and teachers from the Sorbonne. One regular, Marc de la Croix, a history professor, who appeared every day, sat at his usual table near the window and ordered a croissant, a cappuccino, and a cognac.
Professor de La Croix was a stocky man in his early forties. He had ruddy cheeks and thick blond hair that cascaded off his round head. He usually wore a brown suit, with a yellow shirt and a paisley bowtie.
When de la Croix entered today he said good morning to Felix as he always did but he paused for a moment and examined the pigeon. He did not ask why the dead bird rested on the bar nor did he comment on the fact that Felix’s shirt was stained with blood. He simply took his usual seat and ordered.
After a while, Felix went up stairs, washed his face, doctored the bump on his head, took an aspirin and changed his shirt. When he returned, the bar was full and he took his place at the door, where he greeted guests, made out their checks and took their money.
He noticed that someone had removed the pigeon.
At noon, a new woman walked through the door. She reminded Felix of the crows in the trees in the Place. She was tall, almost as tall as Felix, with black eyes and long black hair that she had braided. She possessed a nez bourbon, a racial characteristic of the old French aristocracy that Felix found irresistible. She wore a white silk blouse, a black leather mini skirt, and flat shoes. She carried a weathered leather briefcase and she smelled like chocolate and musk.
“Table for two?” she asked.
“Outside or in?”
“Outside, please. In the shade.”
“There was only one table available but it was in the sun. Felix went to the back and brought out a large green umbrella, which he set up in such a way that the table was now in the shade.
He helped her with her seat and as he did he breathed in her perfume and he felt for a moment dizzy.
“May I get you something?”
“A glass of Sauvignon Blanc.”
He hurried inside, poured the glass himself, and took it to her. As he passed Marie-France she gave him a strange look and he simply shrugged.
Mathieu, on his way out, asked, “Did you notice that the pigeon’s breast was ripped out?”
“No.”
“He must have been attacked by one of those hawks that the city has brought in to cut down on the pigeon population.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The city has brought in hundreds of hawks to keep the pigeon population down. It was in Figaro. Of course, there have been several demonstrations at l'Assemblée Nationale on behalf of the pigeons.
As soon as Mathieu left, Felix asked Guillermo, “Where’s the pigeon?”
He looked up from the omelet he was preparing and pointed to the back.
Felix went down the hall to the back door and then into the alley where the large trash containers were. He opened theirs and examined the dead pigeon that lay on top of a pile of potato peels.
Mathieu was right, he thought, the breast of the pigeon had been ripped from its body.
He walked back through the café and out onto the sidewalk, then crossed the street and entered the small park through a black wrought iron fence. Standing under the trees he examined his building. At the top, perched on top of one of the gargoyles was a hawk, the killer of the pigeon.
As he crossed the street he realized that the crows were gone. They must have left while he was unconscious.
As he passed the woman’s table, he asked, “Would you like another glass of wine?”
She looked up from her book and he was struck once again by the blackness of her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Should I remove this place setting?”
“No, my friend is coming. He is always late.”
De la Croix beckoned him to his table.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen her before.”
“She’s a beautiful woman. Look at that nose. She must have Bourbon blood. It is magnificent. You know what Freud would say about that nose?”
“No. But she is attractive. She possesses the old French looks and grace.”
“For men like us, Beinix, that look is irresistible.”
“Men like us?”
“Men with the old Gallic blood.”
As they admired the woman, a tall man, with dark skin and black hair approached her table. He was tall and powerfully built, with hooded eyes and a nose like a hawk’s beak.
He wore leather pants and boots, a red silk shirt, dark glasses, a silver bracelet on each wrist and silver earrings in each ear. When he reached her table he bent down and kissed the woman on each cheek and then pulled out his chair and moved it closer to her.
Felix excused himself and raced Marie-France to their table to ask the man if he wanted something to drink.
The man ordered a cognac and an espresso.
Felix let Marie-France serve them. While he stood behind the bar and watched them, he guessed that they were not lovers because the woman tensed up, when the man kissed her.
The couple ate and then talked for another hour. Sometimes their voices rose and Felix watched them carefully from a distance. He had not been caught in such a snare for a long time. He was trapped by the woman’s looks and smell.
At two thirty the two stood, kissed briefly, and then left. The man walked toward the Sorbonne, while the woman turned and walked into the park. Felix assumed that she would pass through the park and emerge on the other side of the Place and take the short street that led to the Seine.
They closed the kitchen at three and Guillermo left. Marie-France would stay until five, when the evening shift would arrive. Felix cleaned all the tables and then he and Marie-France placed cloth tablecloths on the tables and set them for dinner.
The bar area stayed open all day.
At four thirty Felix returned to his room, undressed and lay down for a two-hour nap. He left the windows open and listened to pigeons cooing on the ledge outside his window.
While he slept he dreamed that the woman in the café came to him and offered him a square bar of peat, which he held in his hands like some sacred object. As she was handing it to him, he smelled her perfume and she leaned toward him and he kissed her on each cheek and he felt excited and safe.
At six thirty his alarm went off and he showered and shaved and then walked downstairs.
Robert Levy, the night chef, stood in the kitchen, talking with Tasco, his assistant, a short, dark Sicilian, and Laurence, the waitress, was standing at the bar listening to Professor de la Croix.
Felix heard him say, “the Keltoi or the hidden people once ruled this land but they were conquered by the Romans and driven out by other tribes. They worshipped their gods in sacred groves and sometimes identified themselves by a tree."
“They had their own calendars and this time of the year would be associated with the alder and the hawk.”
“Why animals and trees?”
“They were close to nature and associated their own qualities with those of the animals and trees around them.”
With his dream still fresh in his mind, Felix asked the Professor, “Do you know what peat is?”
“Of course, it is the early formation of coal. It consists of dead vegetation, insects, sometimes-decaying bodies, waste, and water. It is sometimes used as fuel by people in rural areas.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I had a dream, where a woman handed me a block of peat.”
The professor started to laugh. “I think that I would reassess that relationship.”
“Me, too,” said Laurence.
Felix glared at her and she jumped off the stool and walked to the back. Laurence was short and dark and lithe, the opposite of Marie-France. She moved around the café in a hurry and sometimes Felix imagined that she was a sparrow hopping on a ledge or chasing a worm in the garden.
Felix walked out onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The shops were closed and the sun was setting. The crows were returning to their roost and he watched as they flew in over the roofs of the building on the Place Triangle to join the congress.
Laurence came out to join him and said, “We’re full tonight.”
“Good. When is the first reservation?”
“Seven thirty.”
At eight thirty the café was full and both Laurence and Felix were scurrying about servicing the diners. He was standing on the sidewalk pouring the wine for a table of four sitting under one of his green umbrellas when he heard the sound of a scooter close to him and he turned to see the woman from lunch pulling up to the curb astride a red Italian scooter. She wore a black leather mini skirt, black leather flats, a gray silk blouse, and a red helmet.
Without turning off the engine of the scooter, she called out, “do you have a table for me?”
Felix finished pouring the wine and walked to the curb.
“No, we are full but you could eat at the bar.”
“Perfect,” she said and parked her scooter on the sidewalk near the door of the café.
Later, Felix placed a menu in front of her. There was only six items.
“I would like a glass of red.”
“I have a nice Lalande de Pomerol.”
“That and the rabbit.”
He placed her order with Robert and then poured her a glass of the red.
“My name is Felix.”
‘Yes, I know. I am Branwen.”
“Odd name. An old name.”
“As old as they get, Felix.”
She looked at him with a twinkle in her eye before she took a sip of the wine.
“Nice, quite nice.”
“And your friend, does he have an old name?”
“Yes. His name is Horace and his name and blood are very old.”
“A noble, huh.”
She laughed. “Not French. He is an Egyptian.”
Branwen stayed until eleven thirty and Felix walked her to her scooter afterwards.
“I hope you come back?”
“I am moving back into the neighborhood.”
“Back?”
“I used to live here a long time ago. You know that this Place is one of the few sacred spots left in Paris that someone hasn’t built a Cathedral or a mosque on top of. Ages ago it was a sacred grove and we came here to worship but we forgot but now we have remembered and we are coming back. They are trying to stop us of course but they won’t be able to this time. They are not as strong as the Romans; their blood is mixed and their resolve . . ..” She waved her arm absently as if to dismiss the unnamed people.
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen to your blood, brother starling, and you will figure it out.”
She kissed him on each cheek, then pulled on her red helmet and mounted her scooter.
Felix closed the café at one and trudged up the stairs. He did not turn on the lights of the apartment because he did not want to attract mosquitoes and moths to the lights. He undressed completely and sat in a leather chair overlooking the park and the old trees. He heard the crows in the trees and he saw two bats flying around one of the streetlights. Somewhere near by he heard doves cooing. He could not remember this much wildlife in the Place. Maybe this was what she was talking about; maybe she was talking about the return of the birds.
He fell asleep in the chair and he dreamed about her. She was in a great field, walking toward a grove of trees on a nearby hill. She was completely naked but her body was painted blue and green and she wore a crown of silver filigree and on the crown near her temples there were two tiny silver leaves. As she walked her haired flowed behind her and he heard her say. “We are coming back to the sacred places.” And then he saw in the dream hundreds of crows flying out of the north toward the hill and beneath the crows wolves ran and she led them all.
The next morning he woke early, dressed, and crossed the street to the park, where he noticed that the crows had made hundreds of nests in the trees. The crows were waking and preparing to leave their roost and go about their business for the day. They seemed not to notice him as he walked under the trees.
When he walked out of the park on his way back to the café, he saw a hawk land on the head of one of the gargoyles and take up its place. A flock of pigeons burst into the air upon the arrival of the hawk, circle the Place, and then flew off in the direction of Notre Dame, while Felix thought about his dream and the woman.
The End
Thursday, October 05, 2006
"The Bite" by Keith Harvey
The Bite
She tattooed his ruddy cheek
with a fatal toothy bite
that resembled a rusty horse’s shoe
and infected his blood with a rabies
so virulent that through his vengeful words
and shaman’s chant
he raised a boar
that gored her side
and burned her blonde fuzz
in a gas chamber assembled
from metallic metaphors
in his English garden.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
"The Shaman" by Keith Harvey
The Shaman
The center is in the clay and the clay is in the center.
So he sat in a clearing until the bees stopped and the wasps stopped.
So he sat until rain fell and aspen leaves spun gold.
So he listened until he was heard.
He looked into the lake where the loon lingers.
So he waited until the center opened and the tree’s root pierced his ear’s drum.
So he sat until the bears came and snow fell onto his shoulders.
So he watched until he was seen.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
"The Hermit" by Keith Harvey
The Hermit
She found the hermit on the west beach looking for flotsam.
“Love me,” she said. He turned slowly, answering her call,
not because he wanted to love her, that was not in his mind.
He turned because he thought he heard a gull
or a sea lion; those were the things he turned to see.
When he recognized her, he turned away
because the sea frothed white in a strong wind
and the sky masked a somber gray.
Monday, September 11, 2006
'Drow Trees" by Keith Harvey
Drow Trees
On the back of a mule, with hounds at heel
-seven in all-he fled the farm and found a fort.
Hidden within its walls, he exchanged draped denim
for lamb’s wool robes and alchemical arts.
Once he scryed a drow pulling rotten teeth,
planting a pine cone with each tooth.
Beneath a larch he turned to stone.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
"The Stranger" by Keith Harvey
The Stranger
They are listed, checked and assigned their place,
one after another through forty years of collecting.
Each one special but the same;
each one a murderer, an executioner, a sadist;
each one a surrogate mother,
who provided milk,
a diversion really from the real quest,
the search for the lost one, the stranger,
who like Talos is molded from red clay
and sandy loam of black woods,
a creature-half man and half bull-
cooked in a canvas tent in a weedy patch
where oil rigs run ragged through the night,
a creature birthed in sweat and blood,
blue bruises and broken noses,
cut from the womb with a broken beer bottle,
who, once found, sits on his Morgan horse
and smokes hand rolled cigarettes
and hums sour tunes about calves and steers.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
"Lake Louise" by Keith Harvey
Lake Louise
The bruised clouds seep over the mountain
and frozen rain peppers the purple lake.
Japanese wearing yellow rain suits
flash photos of glacial residue.
A magpie hops on scree,
an aluminum tab in its beak.
A raven watches from a larch.
The tree's roots entrap Thor’s hammer
thrown by tourists
waiting for their bus.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
"Last Hike" by Keith Harvey
Last Hike
Singing is her green talent.
We follow her, summer children, up the mountain.
She sings to bears that we are eight,
a sinister number;
her Belfast brogue buzzing like bees.
With steady gait, her bonny head bent,
she stops at a blind bend.
Beckoned, blue-black clouds appear.
She raises her hazel eyes;
her fairy voice fractures frozen air.
A lightening strike and she sings us together,
a brood hen shooing chicks to cover.
It rains, then snows, then clears.
A loon swims alone on a lake.
A silver trout severs its silk surface.
Chipmunks chatter in the heather,
while ravens circle above trees.
I wear a ruby rain suit, a cabiri,
carrying my twin self.
My lungs labor in duplex
against the frugal air,
my knees ache, as my back bends
under the double load of my pack.
I thrill at her voice but pray
the bears do not hear.
We traverse the tree line,
stumbling on geodes and scree.
The sun burns our faces and hands.
No bears in this thin country.
They are below, fat and dark,
eating berries in the shadow of larch and fir-
so intent on their feast they cannot hear
her Irish song.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
"Waiting" by Keith Harvey
Waiting
Moss and heather disguise death,
denying past winters’ decay,
casting brown and green
onto the volcanic rock.
Wolf moss clings to the larch.
Fleabane flowers.
Rain darkens the eastern wall;
its frozen drops
pucker the lake’s calm.
A big horn sheep and his ewe
drink; a silver trout
strikes the still surface.
Bear bells tinkle on the pack of some tourist.
Night descends. The moon rises;
its twin lunar face doubles.
The larch needles turn,
as flecks of snow fall.
Summer wanes
as the lone loon waits,
swimming in his singular domination,
scanning the sky for his lost mate.
Monday, August 14, 2006
"Das Wort vom Zur-Tiefe-Gehn" By Paul Celan
I am continuing to wrestle with Paul Celan’s Die Niemandsrose. In a previous post we discussed the first poem of the group-Es War Erde in Ihnen, which on the surface is clearly a reference to the holocaust and his parents’ death. However, there is also a movement toward something-to that unknown other-where a marriage of opposites might occur. This movement toward “marriage” is expressed in the last line of the poem and seems to be the purpose of the poem. From reading his poetry, I believe the movement is toward depth, depth in the sense of psychological depth as set forth in the literature of die Tiefenpsychologie.
The second poem in the sequence-Das Wort vom Zur-Tiefe-Gehn- is more problematic; however, I sense that themes established throughout the work are also here. The poem is quite personal and was written on his anniversary as a gift to his wife. The title refers to a line in a poem by Georg Heym. The title of Celan's poem refers to a direct quote from Heym's poem, where the protagonist asks to be allowed to plunge into the other’s eyes in order to descend to their depth. Here, once again, we have the movement toward the other. And once again we have a movement to the deep/depth of the other through darkness.
The complexity of this short poem arises from the use of a cluster of images involving “word,” “write,” “room,” “deepen,” and “depth.” I believe that Celan is saying that through the “word”-through poetry that they have read together-they have deepened their relationship and this relationship once formed is endless. Through seeing the other through writing they deepen each other in their depth. On one level this is an expression of love from Celan to his wife. On another level it is an expression of love to the unknown other. This unknown other could be God or the Self.
The following translation is mine. I used the German version from Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, Suhrkamp 2003.
The word from To the Depth Goes
that we have read.
The year, the word since then.
We are it still.
You know the room is endless,
you know you do not need to fly,
you know what you have written in your eye
deepens in the depth.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
"Talos" by Keith Harvey
Talos
Born below the ash trees,
in their tarnished shadows,
hammered into being
in the heat of the lower level,
half machine, half bull,
he runs, a warden of the isolated isle,
bright in his bronze skin,
three times daily through sugary sand
at the command of his master, the mage.
And in his mechanical gait
he crushes seashells,
his feet whitened by the gulls’ droppings,
singing his forged songs of servitude,
shining on the edge of the surging sea,
scaring sullen seafarers.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Alchemical Images in Celan's "Die Niemandsrose"
Die Niemandsrose by Paul Celan is a progression of poems that expropriates both alchemical images and mystical symbols of the Kabala to express his psychological distress and his return to Jewishness. I believe he was undergoing the suffering associated with the nigredo, the first stage of alchemical psychological transformation. I also believe he had intimations of a successful outcome: the achievement of the philosopher’s stone. However, his experiences and his personality were such that he could only approach the opus alchymicum in a cynical and pessimistic way. In psychological terms, he was undergoing individuation and as part of the process he was returning to, remembering, and evaluating his earlier spiritual influences. This thesis can be shown through a close reading of the first poem of the collection Es war Erde Ihnen. I have explicated this poem in an earlier post but I did not concentrate on the alchemical symbols. In this poem, Celan uses both images of the concentration camp as well as alchemical signals to illustrate a progression or movement through darkness. The subjects of the poem “dig.” On one level they dig their own graves in the earth but on another level the earth is in them and their digging is in the spiritual body. In alchemy, “earth” is one of the four elements and to achieve the earth metaphorically is to obtain or provide "divine service." In Celan’s poem to dig into the earth is not to achieve “divine service,” although he says that God wants it. Instead his or her dig is to “no one.” However, through the digging the “I” approaches the “you.” In other words, through the digging the “I” approaches and resurrects figuratively through language those who died in the concentration camp. Through the language of the poem, the "I" and the "you" draw closer to wholeness. The "I" says und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring. Through the digging, the “I” approaches the “you” and a certain perfection or wholeness is achieved through the use of the symbol of the “ring.” It is a synecdoche expressing mutiple meanings: the circle of life, the marriage of the opposites or the purification ritual, and wholeness.
"Northman" by Keith Harvey
Northman
From the north he flew
and sat still on silent stone,
reading the sky from right to left
until rain runs into the navel below:
green grass,
scree and geodes,
a menhir shifting toward the south
rubbed raw by the weather;
sheep graze among the crystals,
outcroppings spot the scene.
He sits
and sits,
and stares,
and waits,
his hair falling on his shoulders,
his beard spliced with gray
in its redness, dreaming.
His almond eyes green,
hidden, note his past,
until a cuckoo sounds
and the sun breaks
through bluing clouds,
melting the wax of his wings
and awakening him to gold.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
"Journey" by Keith Harvey
Journey
Her son chased crows and rats from the dying stalks.
Winter was coming.
Her belly rounded and swelled, heavy with the swan’s
child. She felt its darkness and she feared for its safety.
Crow man lay on his back in buffalo grass and watched
white clouds wither and break. Northern breezes hinted at frost
and he thought of clams buried in the sugary sand of the south.
Raven and wolf-girl waded through the tall grass
calling his name until their shadows surrounded him.
Raven said, “the manatees eat tasty grass in the bayou.”
Crow man smiled his crooked smile. He stood and adjusted the stag
horns he now wore. Dried feathers fell, wilted onto the earth.
He thought of the slow manatees
scouring the floor of the bayous,
saltwater bays, and estuaries.
He picked up his reed bag and checked his possessions:
cuckoo egg, peacock feather, rat’s bones, and dried gourd.
He was ready for his fool’s journey.
He would swim with the manatees,
ride their backs into the surf
and sing their oceanic songs.
He would blow the conch shell
and touch the second door.
With a hoot and howl
he struck out through the buffalo grass
with wolf girl snapping at his heels
and Raven above, shading him from the sun.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The "mandorla" in the poetry of Paul Celan
As I read more and more Paul Celan poetry, I have come to realize that his poetry is meant to be a mandorla, a sacred space of creation. The mandorla symbolizes that dark fecund space between the two doors of existence, where the poet, alchemist, or the shaman can create, conjure and remember the greenness of life. Remember the lines from Epitaph for François that I quoted in an earlier post: Die beiden Türen der Welt/ stehen offen/ the two doors of the world stand open.
As J.E. Cirlot states in A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995), “two circles are sometimes used to symbolize the Upper and Lower worlds, that is heaven and earth.” In the poetry of Celan, the two worlds break down between the void or darkness before life and the void or darkness after death. The two circles intersect to form life, where the living remember, observe and create art, which grows the memories of the dead, through the express medium of language. The poet, then, is an alchemical creature, a Hermes, that creates between the two doors. Further, through this creation of man, God becomes whole.
In a poem in Die Niemandsrose, Celan explicitly states his theme. Your/ Being beyond in the night./ With words I fetch you back, there you are,/all is true and a waiting/ for truth. (Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, Persea Books 2002, p. 139).
Thursday, July 27, 2006
"Spiky Palm" and "Illya's Honey/Dallas Poets Community"
I want to thank the editors of Spiky Palm, Carol Cotton and Chuck Wemple, for publishing my poem Seashell in their latest issue and Ann Howells of Illya's Honey/Dallas Poets Community for accepting two poems-Glacier and Sea Wife-for their December issue.
Monday, July 24, 2006
In memory of Cydney W. Adams-"School Days" by Keith Harvey
School Days
A two-wheeled trailer, parked
on a hill in a pasture near Nacogdoches,
casts a silver shadow
toward an anemic creek
with water the color
of a fly’s eye,
as a November sun set.
James, a bottle of Jim Beam
in his hand, said to Cyd
and me, “I love The Dead.
I love it something awful.”
He guzzled the last swallow
of the pint and threw it against a stump.
I opened a Coors that James had driven
to Dallas on a whim to buy and added,
“Me, I like those mystical Germans-
Hesse and Mann, with their long, serpentine
sentences slithering down the page.
Tonio Krüger or old Aschenbach.
That’s for me.”
Cyd, pulling a rotten tooth
from his dwarf sized mouth,
the true poet among us,
sucked on a Camel and said,
“Thomas. That’s the ticket.
The old Dylan.”
James staggered to the trailer,
crawled beneath,
to lie on the earth and sleep.
He wrapped himself in a red blanket
that my Choctaw Granny made me.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Terry asked.
“Resting,” he replied in November
in the piney woods
in 1974 at the end of the war.
A two-wheeled trailer, parked
on a hill in a pasture near Nacogdoches,
casts a silver shadow
toward an anemic creek
with water the color
of a fly’s eye,
as a November sun set.
James, a bottle of Jim Beam
in his hand, said to Cyd
and me, “I love The Dead.
I love it something awful.”
He guzzled the last swallow
of the pint and threw it against a stump.
I opened a Coors that James had driven
to Dallas on a whim to buy and added,
“Me, I like those mystical Germans-
Hesse and Mann, with their long, serpentine
sentences slithering down the page.
Tonio Krüger or old Aschenbach.
That’s for me.”
Cyd, pulling a rotten tooth
from his dwarf sized mouth,
the true poet among us,
sucked on a Camel and said,
“Thomas. That’s the ticket.
The old Dylan.”
James staggered to the trailer,
crawled beneath,
to lie on the earth and sleep.
He wrapped himself in a red blanket
that my Choctaw Granny made me.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Terry asked.
“Resting,” he replied in November
in the piney woods
in 1974 at the end of the war.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Cain and Abel and Corn-Mother
While working on my cycle of poems about Adam and Eve, I returned to Genesis 4:1-8. In thinking about the difference between Cain, the first born, and Abel, the second, it is obvious that the struggle arises between the agriculturist and the shepherd. One sacrifices produce and the other blood. As I was thinking about this difference, it struck me that what is really occurring here is a struggle between an older polytheistic matriarchal society and a newer monotheistic patriarchal one.
Vegetation or agriculture was traditionally controlled by female gods, such as Isis and Demeter, something that would have been abhorrent to the early Hebrews. Consequently, Cain is aligned with the corn-mother or the corn-goddess, while Abel is associated with the very male Hebrew "Lord." The offering of grain and corn is no longer sufficient; instead, the male "Lord" requires blood to be spilt and a life sacrificed.
This interpretation seems plausible when we discover that an ur-text is the Sumerian tale The Wooing of Inanna. This story tells of the ancient conflict between nomadic herders and settled agrarian farmers. Dumuzi, the god of shepherds, and Enkimdu, the god of farmers, compete for Ianna, the chief goddess. Because Dumuzi is brash and aggressive, he wins the favor of Inanna and Enkimdu relents and tells Inanna to marry Dumuzi. Later he wanders away like Cain.
"Corn" by Keith Harvey
Corn
Disguised as a crow, he discovered the cornfield nestled in a valley,
a trough of fertile land stretched between two thighs of hills west
of the red river and south of his first cave, where thousands of crows
circled above green stalks, chiseled into brightness against blue
skies, topped and heavy with maize. Watching the birds
he learned the lesson of the corn and soon he was tearing cobs
from the stalks and eating the white, red, and yellow kernels.
Having eaten his fill he gathered corn in his arms and returned to her;
and, even though it was he that discovered the grain, it was she that saw
its importance and after she had eaten her fill she gathered their possessions
and forced him to move their camp to the hills above the field.
Once there she named it mother because the field nourished them
as she nourished her firstborn from her breasts. She took charge
of the field and told her son that he would be a man of the corn
rather than a febrile crow man like the other, his father.
The son listened carefully and called her corn-mother, confusing the two.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Paul Celan as Shaman
Michael Hamburger in his excellent Poems of Paul Celan, Persea Books, 2002, places two poems side by side, creating, at least for me, the impression that they are to be read together. The two poems are From Darkness to Darkness/ Von Dunkel zu Dunkel and Epitaph for François/Grabschrift für François. The truth of the matter is that Epitaph was written a year before Darkness. Nevertheless they both involve and elicit an understanding of death and its relationship to life and they are both haunting in their simplicity and depth. Ted Hughes believed that the poet was a shaman and that his poetry was ritualistic in nature and had the power to transform the reader. I believe Hughes and I think that the shaman’s power is alive in these two poems. The shaman, like our friend Hermes, is a psychopomp; he leads us to the underworld and then back again. In Darkness, the “I/ich” sees his own darkness in the eye of the other. “Du schlugst die Augen auf-ich seh mein Dunkel leben./ You opened your eyes-I saw my darkness live.” In Epitaph, the dying child opens the two doors of existence-life and death- and the living, the survivor, carries the “green” memory of the dead forward.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
"Lone Wolf" by Keith Harvey
Lone Wolf
She knew that I dreamed of wolves and so on a frigid moonless night
she told me the story of a lone wolf, the only wolf left in a western state,
who traveled several hundred miles north to find a mate
and when he arrived at his destination in another country
this lone wolf discovered for the first time that he was an old wolf,
too old to mate with the young females of this pack,
even though he had sniffed her out on a hint of air.
Too exhausted to return to his country, he hung about the pack,
still a lone wolf but close enough to smell her in heat.
After weeks of following the pack and being driven from his kills
by younger wolves he sickened and died in a stand of ash.
As she told me this story I recognized the wolf in her golden eyes
and I smelled her canine breath as she rested her dark head
on my chest. She smiled, baring her teeth, and I knew
that she saw my gray thinning hair
and the scars on my shoulders and legs.
She knew that my time was passing
and that if I didn’t join the pack now,
her faithful gaze would soon fade away
at the sound of the howls of younger wolves
and she would leave me to the cold and snow,
to hunger for her warmth and starve.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Alchemical Transformation in "As You Like It"
From time to time, while writing, an image will emerge that possesses a magical quality. These images spring forth from the unconscious mind and contain archetypal connections that produce a response in the reader that is somehow related to our deeper non-intellectual understanding. Recently, while reading Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I felt that such a mythic image entered quickly, unbidden and unsuspected, to provide the ultimate solution to the comedy. Further, I believe that these images are alchemical symbols acting as short hand exemplars of transformation.
The play tells the story of two noble families. In each family a brother has betrayed and usurped his brother. As a result of the usurpation the “better” brother is forced into the forest. The forest here is the place where confusion is resolved and consequently takes on the characteristic of a psychological temenos, an enclosure that cooks the participants and transforms them.
The main two characters are Rosalind and Orlando. Rosalind is the young daughter of he banished Duke Senior and Orlando is the younger son of Sir Rowland de Boys. Orlando has been usurped by his oldest brother, Oliver, and denied any participation in his legacy. In fact, as the play opens Oliver plots to have his brother killed in a wrestling match.
Although the plot initially seems to be a revenge play, we eventually learn that it is a comedy and that it will end in marriage. In the end four couples marry and a conversion occurs to Oliver. This conversion is a magical event fraught with mythic overtones. However, it occurs offstage and seems tacked on.
Orlando finds his brother lost and asleep in the forest. A snake is about to enter Oliver’s mouth when Orlando comes to his rescue, driving the snake away; however, a female lion waits in the bushes and attacks Orlando, wounding him severely. Here is the magic-the mythic image of the snake and the female lion serve as a conduit to the mythic plane. On one hand we are to read the scene realistically but on the other we understand that the snake and the lion are familiar archetypal images, as well as alchemical symbols, which transform Oliver through their power. Note that the snake was about to enter Oliver’s sleeping mouth. The snake was about to be ingested and thereby assimilated, while the lioness, the darkened female image, was about to consume him. However, his brother saves him and is wounded by the female lion, which results in conversion and order.
Both the snake and the lioness symbolize “Mercurius or the divine mercurial water of transformation, and the prima materia.” Once again our friend Mercurius or Hermes appears to act in his role of transformation. I believe that Shakespeare used the alchemical images as short hand to show that Orlando and Oliver lost in the forest undergo a psychological sea change.
Friday, July 14, 2006
"Opossum" by Keith Harvey
Opossum
Sniffing strawberries,
she trips a sensor
and two halogen beams
bathe her in light,
blinding her.
She tiptoes,
helpless and exposed,
sniffing her way,
across Mexican tile,
searching for an escape
from this unbearable clarity,
this day for night
on a suburban stage.
She smells the strawberries
and lingers in her desire.
She knows the way back:
across the grass,
up the gingko tree,
scratching its tender bark
with her claws,
a run along a gnarled limb,
traversing the fence,
a jump to the live oak,
a descent to the alley,
a sprint to the drainage ditch
that passes beneath the freeway,
and finally an escape into the woods.
However, the smell of the berries
traps her within the light
that reveals her vanity:
her hairless tail,
her blanched fur,
infested with lice,
her sensitive snout,
and her weak, moist eyes.
Like a diver,
she hesitates
before her jump.
But the light hurts,
so she flees
and as she does
the light fades
but she lacks courage
to return.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
"Anger" by Keith Harvey
Anger
She finds him in a hollow
talking with a red fox,
their two heads pressed together
in quiet communion.
The sight of him dressed in his feathers,
whispering confidences to the silky fox,
so angers her
that if she were not holding
his newborn son on her hip
she would smash his head
with the first smooth stone
that would fit her hand.
The child, sensing her anger,
fights against her grip
and fills the hollow
with his fledgling cries,
forcing her to shift him
to the other hip
and frightening the fox
who flees
into a copse
of ash.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
"Herm" by Keith Harvey
This is a photograph of a herm as it finally developed in Greece.A herm as we discussed in several postings on Hermes was a marker. Originally, it was a pile of rocks, sometimes piled into a phallic shape, that marked a direction or a distance. As time passed, the Greeks refined and concretized the image to include the likeness of the god Hermes with a phallus scuplted into the base. The herm dramatically illustrates the mythic process. The inner psychological image and characteristics of the travelling god was thrown or projected onto the stone markers until an image, shared and discussed by the countless travelers passing by, concretized. Once concretized the image acted pictorially on the conscious mind of all future travellers, thereby adding to the inventory of stories and images associated with Hermes.
In a recent addition to my cycle of poems on Adam and Eve, the herm makes an appearance.
The Herm
Covered in crow feathers,
he danced on one foot
shaking his dried gourd,
singing a love song
until she disappeared
behind the yellow horizon.
He tired,
sank onto salt grass,
and listened to the cicadas’
vibrations rise and fall
like frothy waves.
On the second day,
he watched
a murder of crows,
so socially astute
that he felt an ache
like hunger,
circle and gambol
in the western sky.
On the third day,
he gathered stones
into a motley heap
and wove feathers
within the crevices
like fingers interlaced.
He inserted a twig,
its green point aiming
at his feathered back,
as he jiggled west,
chanting softly,
punching each step
with a comic slap.
On the fourth day,
she found the stones
and grunted
as she shifted the newborn
to her left hip.
As her magic,
she deposited
a sparrow’s wing
and a wasp’s nest,
before following
his crow feet prints
on red sand.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
"Waiting" by Keith Harvey
Waiting
At dawn she wiggled from their nest of pine needles
and laurel leaves.
When he tried to rise,
she pushed him down
and shook her head.
She staggered from the woods,
her legs swollen and her feet
round like breadfruit,
holding her distended belly,
teetering with every step.
He hid his head among the leaves,
ashamed that she would suffer so.
He watched the morning light
strike her shoulders,
dabbing a halo of light around her dark head,
her hair cascading down her naked back.
She entered the bulrushes,
that marked the river,
and then disappeared.
He imagined her wading across the river,
climbing the red clay bank
onto the yellow grass of the savannah,
where the sun boils and the red lions hunt.
Once she was gone, he lay flat,
listening to the metallic rattle of the cicadas,
their noise roiling through the woods like waves
against pumice rocks on black sand.
He was now afraid.
To find solace,
he gathered crow feathers,
cracked a zebra’s femur,
smeared gelatinous marrow
over his pale skin,
and attached the feathers.
He painted his face black
with soot from last night’s fire
and tied a crow’s skull to his head
with a strand of his red hair.
He climbed a rock
and squatted.
Turning toward the south,
he shook a dried gourd
and cawed into the dry air.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
"Wolf" by Keith Harvey
Wolf
Near a stone house,
in a shadowed
wood,
the wolf flees.
Hounds’ howl
and hunters’ horns
awaken the boy
within.
Inspired
he sings
in a nest of sheets
so soft and sweet
that the wolf,
curious,
stops
and mounts
the porch
to peer
through glass.
Startled
by his double,
his snout snaps
against the pane.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
"Afterbirth" by Keith Harvey
Afterbirth
She braced herself
against the bark
of the baobab
and screamed,
her cries startling the hyenas
who chased their stubbed tails
around and around
until dust floated
over the sweet grass
of the savannah
and yellowed the child,
who fell toward earth
in a rush of blood and brine.
Here was her revenge,
her premeditated step
toward reclamation
of the Garden.
She gazed
upon the termite’s tower
that defiantly stood
against the blueness
of the sky
and knew
that this mound
of industry
would be his symbol.
She laughed
once he was free,
lying on the earth,
his uncircumcised member
pointing toward the stars
parallel to the termite’s spire,
because creators
often laugh
after creation,
just as He laughed,
when he pried her
from her man’s
red clay chest.
"The Cobra" by Keith Harvey
The Cobra
She sat,
her legs spread,
in the shadow
of a baobab tree
and rubbed her belly,
as the baby kicked
to the rhythm
of the cicada,
their sounds
cascading
through the heat
like shifting shells
in a dried gourd.
She focused
on a termite mound
rising from the savannah
to divert her pain.
Ants scoured the grass
around her feet.
She closed her eyes
and entered
the other world,
the home of the cobra,
who waited
and upon her entrance
rose up,
a temple
of scales,
and spread its hood;
its forked tongue
flicked
and stung her nose.
She recoiled
and cursed
as her water broke
and soaked the sand.
Friday, June 16, 2006
"Crow and Crane" by Keith Harvey
Crow and Crane
As she lay
on her side
spent
on ferns
full of him
she watched a crane
wade
through the shallows
at the river’s edge
snap a frog in two
with its beak
and swallow
with a forward thrust.
She closed her eyes
and saw crows
fly in parallel
a mating ritual,
a preamble
to the crane’s feast,
and she praised the crows
for their instruction
and worshipped
the whiteness
of the crane’s wing.
As she lay
on her side
spent
on ferns
full of him
she watched a crane
wade
through the shallows
at the river’s edge
snap a frog in two
with its beak
and swallow
with a forward thrust.
She closed her eyes
and saw crows
fly in parallel
a mating ritual,
a preamble
to the crane’s feast,
and she praised the crows
for their instruction
and worshipped
the whiteness
of the crane’s wing.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Rodin and Eve
I read the King James version of the Bible. That is is the only version I have ever read and it is frankly the only version I am interested in reading. I like the language and the images, the metaphors and the tropes. So when I started my cycle on Adam and Eve I turned to the Bible that I have carried since I was twelve years old to review the chronology of the story.
In the latest poem in my cycle, Eve becomes pregnant. The Biblical chronology is that first they are expelled from the Garden and then in Genesis 4:1: Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, 'With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.'
In my version Eve watches the animals and wonders why they are alone. When Adam is asleep, she initiates their mating and her plan to increase their numbers. However, later, when she is afraid she praises the Lord for her pregnancy, hoping that he will protect her.
In imagining Eve's pregnancy I studied several artists's rendition of the event and I found Rodin's unfinished sculpture, entitled Eve, the most interesting. I was happy to learn through reading Rilke that the model for Eve was pregnant at the time.
Rodin confided to Dujardin-Beaumetz: Without knowing why, I saw my model changing. I modified my contours, naively following the successive transformations of ever-amplifying forms. One day, I learned that she was pregnant; then I understood. The contours of the belly had hardly changed, but you can see the sincerity with which I copied nature in looking at the muscles of the loins and sides. It certainly hadn't occurred to me to take a pregnant woman as a model for Eve; an accident - happy for me - gave her to me and it aided the character of the figure singularly. But soon, becoming more sensitive, my model found the studio too cold; she came less frequently, then not at all. That is why my Eve is unfinished(H. Dujardin-Beaumetz, Entretiens avec Rodin, 1913)
Door Images in Paul Celan's "Grabschrift für François"
I heard an interview the other day with the poet Billy Collins, who said that the theme of all poetry is death. I am not sure that I believe that but in regard to Paul Celan it seems to be true. Recently, I discovered a new image, related to death, that possessed a certain resonance for me. It is the image of two worlds, two places, two doors, and a space in between. I noticed the image first in Grabschrift für François, a poem written after the death of his first son. However, there is an echo or a trace of the theme in a letter written to his wife Gisèle on January 7, 1952, almost two years before the death of François.
He begins the letter by saying, Maïa, mon amour, je voudrais savoir te dire combien je désire que cela reste, nous reste, nous reste toujours/ Maïa, my Love, I want you to know how much I desire that this remains, we remain, we remain always. As I read this I have the impression that he is afraid that the present moment, the moment in which they are in love and together, may pass. He continues with the image of doors slamming behind him as he quits a world and moves toward her. The question is, of course, what world is he leaving: the world of the work camps, the world of the refugee, the world of solitude. He explains by saying, car elles sont nombreuses, les portes de ce monde fait de malentendus, de fausses clartés, de bafouages [sic]/ because they are numerous, the doors of this world made of misunderstandings, false expressions, and nonsense.
In the first sentence of the poem Grabschrift für François, he writes that the two doors of the world stand open, opened by “you,” his son, in the “Zwienacht,” the “two night.” Here the dichotomy between life on the one hand and death on the other is emphasized, opening up a space, a space of existence for the “living,” the survivors, who hear the two doors slam (hit) and slam (hit). In the second sentence he says that “we hear them slam (hit)(schlagen) and slam (hit)(schlagen) and we carry the uncertain, and we carry the green in your always.”
The notes to the letter, composed by Celan’s son, Eric, state that the letter was written while his father was upset at the accusations of Yvan Goll’s wife that Celan had plagiarized certain poems. It is interesting to note that during times of extreme emotional distress that the image of the doors between worlds emerges in his conscious mind.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Crow as Image
As I began working on my cycle of poems about Adam and Eve the crow appeared. His appearance was not benign. In fact, the power of the image was so strong that I felt the crow taking over. It was also at this time that I discovered Ted Hughes' collection of poems entitled Crow, an event that I considered synchronistic in nature and effect. As I read through this collection, I will be discussing the poems.
The crow has always been important to me and for many years I thought of the crow as my totem. In alchemical terms, the crow is associated with the nigredo, the first stage of the great work that leads to the philosopher’s stone. The nigredo is black in color and symbolizes “putrefaction.” The Hermitis Trismegisti Tractatus Aureus describes the initial stage of death and dissolution, the preamble to the great work, as follows: “the First is the Corvus, the Crow or the Raven, which from its blackness is said to be the beginning of the Art.” In the first stage, “the old body of the metal or matter for the Stone is dissolved and putrefied into the first matter of creation, the prima material, so that it may be regenerated and cast into a new form.” Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, Cambridge University Press 1998.
Additionally, the crow in Amerindian mythology is sometimes a trickster, a demiurge or a god; in oriental mythology the crow stands for the yin, the feminine; in Norse mythology the crow is guide and companion of Odin; and in the Old Testament, Noah sends out the crow as scout before sending the dove.
Even our old friend Hermes is associated with the crow because it is the crow who reports to Apollo Hermes' theft of the cattle. See earlier posts on Hermes and Apollo.
The crows appear in my latest Adam and Eve poem-"The Plan."
The Plan
She was sore,
rubbed raw by pumice stone,
and pink from red water.
Crow feathers floated down stream
toward a blacker sea.
He lay beside her,
inert, unaware of her mission,
his mouth open,
snoring in the shade of the fir tree.
Yellow butterflies left pollen traces
on his ruddy brow
and ants crawled across his feet.
She compared the red lion
under the baobab tree
servicing his six females
with him
and judged him puny,
with only one mate.
As he slept, she hatched her plan
to make him powerful and rich.
She lowered herself onto him,
suspecting this was the way,
after watching the bison,
the monkeys,
and the eels mate,
after seeing the crows locked together
free fall through the white clouds,
and after listening to the angels gossip.
They fit;
she rocked like the limbs of the fir
swaying in the southerly wind
until he popped
like an oyster
in her salty mouth.
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Schadenfreude" by Keith Harvey
Starting in 1944, the B-29 Superfortress was used in the Pacific Theater. The most famous B-29 was the Enola Gray, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Schadenfreude
Bottle flies buzz in September.
Bumblebees wallow in yellow flowers.
At the sound of the siren,
the matron orders,
you must slide from your seat,
shelter yourself beneath your desk,
plant your head between your knees,
and thread your hands over your neck.
Anna crouches
beneath her desk
and I see her white panties.
On the way home
butterflies dance from rose blooms,
hummingbirds drink from honeysuckle,
and mockingbirds trill in the oak trees.
We play in Anna’s shelter.
We lay on cool concrete
and imagine an after-world,
as mice scurry
behind cartons
of surplus K-Rations.
Our sweaty hands
reach for darkness.
At home I lie on my bed.
B-29s hang from the ceiling,
pieces of a half constructed B-24
cover my desk.
I hear the president on television
and I dream of the world after
with Anna and the mice
in the gray coolness
of the shelter
where our hands touch
the shadows.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Pearl Fichman, Paul Celan and reading Rilke
Recently, I discovered Pearl Fichman's unpublished memoir of her life in Czernowitz, entitled Before Memories Fade.
http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Czernowitz/Fichman/
I found it an interesting and touching story and I commend it to anyone intrested in knowing what Paul Celan's world was like before and during World War II. Further, Ms Fichman sheds a great deal of light on what happened to Celan's family and the members of their community when the Germans arrived.
There is also a charming vignette, describing Jewish teenagers on an outing, listening to Celan, then Paul Antschel, reading Rilke. She writes: We sometimes went on long hikes, to the woods around Czernovitz, a day’s outing. Everyone carried a knapsack on the back, wore shoes with heavy soles and white, knee-high cotton socks. The girls wore a "dirndl" which consisted of a white blouse, a flowered skirt and a little apron, adorned with lace. It was the way the Tyrolians dressed, an old Austrian custom. Sometimes, we would sit in a meadow and one or another would read aloud. Paul Antschel, who later changed his name to Celan, loved to read to the group poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, in German, of course. Sometimes we’d read aloud H. Heine poems and sometimes we’d sing.
"Thaw" by Keith Harvey
Thaw
I squat on clay, fishing.
Long hair bison graze on the opposite shore,
while red lions roar in the savannah.
Vultures circle on whispered warmth.
She approaches, crow feathers falling from her skin,
her face painted black with soot,
a crow’s skull balanced on her head.
I am hot and these feathers stink, she says.
She sinks into the red water and scraps black feathers
from her skin with a pumice rock.
She emerges pink and clean
and lays on fragrant ferns
beneath the fir trees.
I wade into the river and wash.
Winter is over;
the bushes droop with berries,
their cinnabar juice stains my lips,
their thorns tear my skin,
as bees covered with pollen
yellow the sky
with their hum.
I squat on clay, fishing.
Long hair bison graze on the opposite shore,
while red lions roar in the savannah.
Vultures circle on whispered warmth.
She approaches, crow feathers falling from her skin,
her face painted black with soot,
a crow’s skull balanced on her head.
I am hot and these feathers stink, she says.
She sinks into the red water and scraps black feathers
from her skin with a pumice rock.
She emerges pink and clean
and lays on fragrant ferns
beneath the fir trees.
I wade into the river and wash.
Winter is over;
the bushes droop with berries,
their cinnabar juice stains my lips,
their thorns tear my skin,
as bees covered with pollen
yellow the sky
with their hum.
Friday, June 02, 2006
"The Crow People" by Keith Harvey
The Crow People
The crows were the last to leave.
Even the snow leopard fled
when the snow turned blue
and the river shimmered
and sparkled like diamonds.
We huddled in our cave and debated
whether we too should follow the crows.
It was that night that we became the crow people.
We covered ourselves with feathers
And painted our faces black with soot.
We moved south following the droppings
of the long horned kine.
We cawed in the frosty mornings
and huddled in the branches of a fir tree
at night.
The crows were the last to leave.
Even the snow leopard fled
when the snow turned blue
and the river shimmered
and sparkled like diamonds.
We huddled in our cave and debated
whether we too should follow the crows.
It was that night that we became the crow people.
We covered ourselves with feathers
And painted our faces black with soot.
We moved south following the droppings
of the long horned kine.
We cawed in the frosty mornings
and huddled in the branches of a fir tree
at night.
"Winter Plus One" by Keith Harvey
Winter Plus One
After the first smothering snow,
I swore it would not be colder.
She shrugged her shoulders
and shuddered beneath the leaves,
as I stoked the starving fire.
I was wrong;
it did get colder.
Ice blued
and scrapped the soil
like flint
scratches fat
from a goat’s skin
straining the earth
with a frigid fist
pushing the long horned kine
south with the crows.
Talking Drum in Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"
Before we move on to the fourth line, I want to concentrate on the image in the second and third line. A headless minstrel, turning blue, beats a drum made of moss and pubic hair. This is a vivid and precise image of a surrealistic phenomenon. In other words, it is exactly what a surrealist image should be. The minstrel is both a musician and an artist, just as a poet is both a singer and a painter of verbal imagery. As a minstrel, Celan is saying that he is servant or a performer in the service of someone else, someone in charge, someone superior. In this case, this someone is the unidentified “you,” a “you, who through the minstrel’s performance, grows through the performance. The painting or drawing within the poem occurs in the sand, the same sand that fills the urns. So through the painting in the sand the urns are filled and the “you” is nourished. More precisely, the minstrel’s performance is a celebration of the memory of the “you” in the face of the forgetting and thereby a remembrance and an enhancement of the “you”.Additionally, the minstrel plays the drum for the ”you.” The playing could be an entertainment but also a communication. Drums were used in Africa to communicate over long distances and were called the “talking drums.” Interesting enough is the fact that the “talking drums” were shaped like an hourglass, a container of sand that measured time. The communication here is between the forgetting and the remembering.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Unconscious Mind in Celan's "Sand from the Urns"
Mondvogel, Edgar Jené 1950.In the third line of Sand from the Urns, the minstrel, without a head, performs for the “you.” Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar;/He beats the drum of moss and bitter pubic hair for you. In using “pubic hair,” Celan situates the performance lower than the head, the seat of intelligence. The drum comes from the genitals, a more primal, less conscious region and the moist earth. “Moss,” “pubic hair” and “mold” seem to be connected through appearance and texture and align themselves with a lower more complex conciousness. We could list the comparisons, including, inter alia, color, texture, dampness, accessibility to light, fecundity, and smell. However, I believe he selected these terms for all those associations and also to create a Gothic sense of mood, to find words that would convey an expression of dampness, decay, seclusion, and earthiness and lead us to a deeper, non-rational meaning, a meaning that feels fecund and fertile.
Support for this analysis arises from Celan’s prose work-Edgar Jené und der Traum vom Traume, which appeared in 1948 as introductory text to a book of paintings and lithographs produced by Jené. See earlier post on Jené. Celan, in discussing the paintings, states that “But my mouth, which lay higher than my eyes and was bolder because it often has spoken in my sleep, had run ahead of me and called back its ridicule to me: . . . ‘You would be better off getting a pair of eyes from the bottom of your soul and placing them on your breast: then you will find out what is happening here.’”(Quoted and translated by Jerry Glenn in his Paul Celan, Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1973) Celan, first, says that the words spoken in a dream, from the unconscious mind, are wiser than intellectual analysis and, second, he calls for direct access to the heart, to the feelings. In other words, rational discussion through the intellect will not produce truth. One must contact the source of the image, the unconscious mind, to find images strong enough to perform for the “you.” The head, the conscious mind, is useless because it will try to bring order to the chaos of images. The unconscious mind, with its fecund images, conveys a more profound image, richer in quality, and fraught with the elements of depth, i.e. soul.
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