You Know No One

The Food of Love

The two young women sitting across from each other at a small café table were undeniably cut from the same pattern, like that of a quilted doll.  Both girls had round cheeks and smooth foreheads, which gave both an air of noble wisdom and childish innocence.  The brown-haired girl sat back in her chair, with her hands set across her lap, palms uplifted.  The blonde sat forward on her seat and spoke as though she were painting a pane of glass with her stories, letting her blue eyes tell the other half.  Her sister's eyes--the same blue sea glass eyes, deep-set and round as marbles--smoldered with an unspoken passion, but her close-mouthed smile betrayed neither jealousy nor admiration.

He sat three tables over, watching the American girls, falling in love with each word.  If he had been able to hear the fair-haired girl's story, he wouldn't have understood; French was all he knew of the world.  But beauty knew no language, and he had never seen young girls so unblemished and golden.  He gazed longingly at the long white fingers the blonde girl was waving around, creating stars at each fingertip.  She was open and excited, a mischievous angel.  She was easy to fall in love with.  The other young woman, though, was harder to crack.  She was intense, but stoic.  Her body was taut, as though she were about to bolt through the café door and streak down Rue St-Benoit.  When he looked at her, he saw a vibrating bottle of jazz riffs, tied end to end one to the other, knotted up and ready to explode.  He gasped, suddenly, realizing he'd been holding his breath.

Summer in Paris was coming to an end, the light dying earlier than it had the day before and later than it would the next night.  He wanted to love them, but he was too old.  He wanted to speak of devotion, but he didn't have the words with which to profess it.  So, instead, he gathered up his burlap bag and walked toward their table.  The blonde stopped speaking and both girls looked up at him with their sea glass eyes as he put the bag on their table.  Now that he stood next to their table, he discovered that the dark-haired girl had an unrefined splash of freckles across her nose and the blonde's skin was maybe a bit too oily.  Moreover, her accent was a touch harsh, and her hands looked much older than her face.  His heart sank a little; these women were just like all the other women he passed on the street: a little worn and even a little more ordinary.  But the moment was over almost as soon as it had hit him.  The old man loved them--had from the start--and he was willing to wait for the ethereal ladies he had first seen to reappear.

He wanted to give them something but had little more than a handful of bashful French words to whisper.  Instead, he put all he had on the table; from his bag he extracted three melons and five tomatoes.  The sisters sat stunned, staring long at the produce that had come to keep their coffee cups company.  After several seconds that stretched beyond comfort, the sisters burst into a simultaneous chorus of laughter, harmonizing the sound of a staccato flute with the mellow meandering of a marimba.  His heart swelled; their scorn wasn't even enough to change his mind.

All at sea, the old man went in search of a song.  If he could not satisfy his appetite, an excess of music might just be enough to kill it.

Expecting Rain

photo by katie t

Like a dog

Chasing its tail

You followed me around.

You followed me down

The driveway, overgrown,

Led beyond the line of light.

Trees singing, groaning,

The storm covered us

Like a blanket my mother 

Bought and sold

To the Mexican lady next door.

Summer nights I'd leave

My window open to the sound

Of lightning and the flash of

Thunder in the distance like

Cannons unrestrained,

Blowing past

And present into

My bedroom, full of

Light as the wind

Whipping through the garden

Left me breathless.

You left me like a dog

In the field, overgrown

With questions only

Whispered to the trees, and the moon

Stood on its head

With a halo of ice 

Cold and distant, years away

From where we started.

You left me at the end

Of the driveway in my passivity.

You left me expecting rain.

Whatcha Tryin' to Prove?

The Truth Lies in Proust

"...it is not only the physical world that differs from the particular way we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving, which we compose with the help of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are functioning all the same, just as tress, the sun, and the sky would not be the way we see them if they were perceived by creatures with eyes differently constituted from our own, or with organs other than eyes, which fulfilled the same purpose and conveyed equivalents of trees and sky and sun, but not visual ones....

...people do not, as I had imagined, present themselves to us clearly and in fixity with their merits, their defects, their plans, their intentions in regard to ourselves (like a garden viewed through railings with all its flower beds on display), but, rather, as a shadow we can never penetrate of which there can be no direct knowledge, about which we form countless beliefs based upon words and even actions, neither of which give us more than insufficient and in fact contradictory information, a shadow that we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, as masking the burning flames of hatred and of love."  Vol. 3, pp. 60-61


Food for thought/more truths:
Kerouac thought of himself as "a running Proust."  Coincidence that I love them both or that I'm thinking about simultaneously revisiting The Dharma Bums?  Not on your life.


*Translation copyright © Mark Treharne, 2002