Femme du monde
Fat, face the color of blanc on blanc,
smelling of cheap tobacco and many unwashed garments,
from the other end of the car,
the unmistakable melody of La vi en rose
scratched against tender ears of Parisian commuters.
"Not La vi en rose again", said the young Frenchman facing me.
I understood every word he said.
The old woman singing was no tiny sparrow,
no waif.
Her corpulent canine companion was equally uncouth.
She sang Piaf's signature song with a hostile gusto,
each syllable enunciated loudly.
We sniggered as the singing voice came closer.
So close we began to sing along, conspirators, smiling.
And we welcomed the doleful silence at the song's inevitable end.
I gave her a centime or was it two?
She deserved it.
Was she blind?
Did it matter?
As for me, I am weary of speaking shattered Spanish with
Argentinean intellectuals
and outmoded American slang with the Moroccan grocer and his
cousins
on the Boulevard Saint-Michel near rue du Val-de-Grâce
And I cannot seem to count past the number, sept!
Gloved hands push apart the Metro's doors. It is journey's end.
I try singing Piaf's mysterious refrain, grateful for my own
soulful silly version on the walk towards the rue Henri-Barbusse,
a short slice of street named for a revolutionary
or was he a pirate philosopher?
Tired and cheered outside my American language, I am
puzzled with the battered glamour of this city
built for electric illuminations, swift flirtations,
as I follow the paths to dead poets shaped in solemn statuary
harboring the austere lawns of the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Patricia Spears Jones, "Femme du monde" from A Lucent Fire. Copyright © 2015 by Patricia Spears Jones. Reprinted by permission of White Pine Press.
Source:
A Lucent Fire
(White Pine Press, 2015)
