MY PARENTS MEET AT LA GRANDE PLACE
He sits in a corner café, waiting for
the girl to join him,
as he looks up at the tarnished majesty
of domes that crowd the broad shoulders of
buildings.
Tiny streets break off at corners like veins,
bleeding as streams of people course in and
out.
Again feeling the slight tremor, he thinks,
'it's as they told me: the pages
of history.'
Around him, shop windows line the square,
decorated with infinite patterns of
ancient lace.
Spinsters working at their spools,
'the last of a dying breed,' he thinks,
the threads of their longing patterned
into this intricacy,
unraveling if only the smallest thread
is pulled.
He knows that behind him in Brooklyn,
his mother is setting out her good
tablecloth.
She will study again the black and
white photographs,
edges cut in mock gilt as crisp as
the scalloped gaufres he eats.
The phrases he learns seem too small
for his yearning,
his broad accent breaking the delicate
china plates
of French words he wants to caress.
But no one had told him about the loneliness,
how some dawns would rise
with no break from the blackness of
night,
the day so shrouded in heaviness
he had to wonder how planes could get
through.
No reference, no Rilke, no grand extrapolation
could keep the grey from creeping over
each white wall,
every surface as blank as the map once
laid out
to chart the New World.
Copyright 2000, Elline Lipkin
Elline Lipkin is currently a poetry Ph.D. student at the University
of Houston.
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