You could be listening to Ma Vlast
In a bistro, reading
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Or hunched beneath Notre Dames
Counting les heures before a heist
Working up a heuristic
For the hairless coconut you found on a sandbar
Off Pago Pago
It doesn’t matter
Anyone can say anything here,
Most etiquettes, dreams, and quick bidettes
Are de rigeur and tres o.k.: Oy Vey–
It’s Paris.

No etymologies please or epiphanies
No striptease down to the red stilettos
On the deck of the ferry from Marseilles
Just bring poppies
Trifle to the Eiffel
And we’ll do the rest
In our bain marie
In the maraveille that is Paris.

In the Bohemian Quarter
She with the cache of ben oo la la balls
Trills a chanson on the skin flute’
There is a riotous hoisting of all petards
In fact D’ Artagnan’s here
Bien sur, Stein with uber-Alice and her tender button,
And dear lachrymose Chopin–
Gershwin knew enough to swim
With Hemingway and F. Scott’s Nick Carraway
In spite of that foul-mouthed Sartre

Dust of the ages in the wind
The perennial verdure of Tullieres
The goosed foie gras that gives you dysentery
And I may have forgotten to mention
All that phenomenal art

Monet Gaugin Rodin
Too loose Lautrec Manet the ballet
Debussy Delibes Ravel Faure
And never forget the Perrier Joeut
The motet, the cadet the plies
The pirouette the glissade
The certemente the barrage

You’ll be exhausted
It will have cost you
But you haven’t lived
Until you’ve been done
By Paris.

copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews
2011 all rights reserved