WEDNESDAY
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Photograph by Donna Marie
Bergeniao 11/11/2003
A Thought for Today
A Toast: May your hand be full for always, if only with another hand. May your heart be empty only long enough to give you cause to fill it up again.
FLIGHTS FROM6THE
PAST
19 January, 1999
PARIS IN WINTER
Seldom have I carried anyone, though I've tried. But, oh, the times when I've been lifted high by love, transported. Once in winter... a friend or lover's unselfish thought, transported by an idea culled from someone else's ideology. Once in winter...
-from "We Touch the Sky, 1978 & 1979.
On stage I've been known to forget the lyric to a song I've sung a hundred times. When it happens more than once you learn quickly to make up something, anything, words, words nearly any words because the orchestration behind you is strict and won't pause for anything. Sometimes the substitute lyrics work and you feel no one is the wiser, more often they don't and the following number is performed with lethal concentration.
With poetry it's different. No, I don't have that many of my poems committed to memory but if I read or hear a phrase from something I've written I can almost always remember the exact circumstance of its origin. The how, the where, the why and especially the who of it.
"Jean, One." was written in Paris on a Sunday in 1977. It was a heady time, for me, my recording of "Amour" had been released three weeks earlier and now nested comfortably at number one on the French Hit Parade. Charles Aznavour had invited me to guest on his Sunday evening TV show "Music & Musique". We were to do a medley of songs both in English and French (each having the word Paris in it) then I would sing "Amour." Between the afternoon rehearsal, which seemed to go well, and the evening performance, I wrote the poem.
As a poem "Jean, One" is neither my best or worst effort, but as a chronicle every word of it is faithful to the Saturday Night before that produced it.
- RM First published in Flight Plan 1/19/99 Previously unpublished
JEAN, ONE
for Jean, la vie, une vie
Noc - Noc had a party.
I remember that I came in white,
my flesh beneath
an off white parka
pale as any winter.
I must have wanted to be like
that never ending Paris snow.
And like the snow
I melted deep into the crowd.
Heady with new hang-ups
brought along across the ocean
I wanted to remain unnoticed, uninvolved.
Carefully I picked a corner
staked it out
and built a wall,
real enough to make
penetration impossible.
The Epiphany pie was passed
I sliced the smallest piece -
though I was eager for insurance
safe balm or palmistry
spelling out the year ahead.
As those things happen,
and we are not to know
just why they do,
you came through the door
sometime after nine o'clock.
No exploration,
no initial glances.
The night was moving
not by hours, but by inches.
No testing, feeling out,
we left surveillance
to professionals
becoming innocents
and amateurs
for that one evening.
Then
like children
through the streets
we stumbled and ran
eager to be home
in that hotel room bed,
discovering the truth
we knew already -
that we would fit
each others contours
doped and groggy
or alert.
Passion the penultimate.
Need the know all.
And something more,
a kindly survey
of each other
eye to eye
body to body
unafraid.
I cannot conceive
of anything we did not
or would not do together.
You were all the angels
in the Abbaye
who had waited patiently
exploring other bodies
through the years
then giving all the stored up
knowledge you had come upon
to me.
It mingled with my own
until the larder of our learning
was flowing over and overflowed.
Having come back
to a favored city
after too long a time
My need spread over you
and into you
like a mantle of want.
I held back not a nod
or wince.
I was
I am convinced
no motion or emotion
stayed fastened
to its mooring place
and no clocked-off hour
was wasted or ill spent.
The morning
and the night
and another morning came
each went away
as we grew stronger
because the pouring into
one another
came from each of us
in equal measure.
Pleasures
of the pleasure dome
not known to me
are well known now
as I look back
upon my sojourn
into your Samarkand.
So it was
we squandered
all the silence
and knelt together
in the endless night
that stretched through the days.
Your face was like
a mirror
and like Narcissus
I looked into it
with longing and with love.
Whatever else the Paris winter offered
stays a mystery.
- from "We Touch The
Sky", 1978 & 1979
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