Jill Pearlman

Sunday on the cusp of August in the countryside should be long, should feel endless.  At midi, noon in France, a stillness sets in that is both awesome, in the classical sense of the sun’s strict justice, and dauntingly hot.  You will be trying to name that song the cicadas keep spinning — drone, chant — and might fall into an inspired trance.  There are flies on your ankles and the slow swirling scent of the time or its demise, of memories you’ve had or never had, of something tantalizing—

Just over there, beyond the dry field or on Monday, is spanking new blacktop that replaces graceful tree-lined roads once for horses, tractors and speeding Sunday-lunch drunkards.  There is an epidemic of pregnant roundabouts that keeps giving birth to more and more roundabouts.  The voices of trees that we come to hear every year are frailer and frailer.  They check on us too – as nature looks in on us wayward, unplanted humans. 

Eyeballing shrubs in a new peach orchards I count neary 500, maybe 1000, planted with geometric precision, rays of sun splaying from all perspectives, an earthy Versailles.  Everywhere, but especially in France, in a sleight of hand, nature always a part of culture. We salute the wary rapport with a nod towards timelessness, with or without us. 

Say her name. Dites son nom. Say the names of Jewish children — more than 4,000— who were taken 80 years ago this weekend from Paris apartments in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 20th arrondissements. They were separated from their mothers, their fathers who were also corralled in the Velodrome d’Hiver near the Eiffel Tower, en route to concentration camps.  There are placards on the streets of neighborhoods — trendy rue de la Roquette, for example — with pictures of the kids in their bows and best dresses, their faces of trust.  In a recent documentary, one of the few women who survived said, we had faith; this was the land of Voltaire and Diderot. 

With foreboding in the air, breakdown of norms and language, with the rattle of war, it’s essential that the French et al pay attention to this anniversary of so-called “La Rafle du Vel d’Hiv.”  Podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions are revisiting the targeted and choreographed swooping of French gendarmes to arrest, in two days in 1942, 13,152 Jews.  The roundup started with immigrants from Eastern Europe, but grew to include French Jews. Collaborist Vichy government was making “good” on promises to Gestapo, which had occupied the zone since 1940.   

An exhibition of Cabu, the beloved cartoonist who was killed in terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, is especially powerful.  A student of both Rembrandt and Goya, he imagined scenes that had been meticulously researched and documented for the groundbreaking 1967 book “La Grand rafle du Vel d’Hiv” by Claude Levy and Paul Tillard.  Cabu’s original ink drawings are forcefully imagined, a child being a child against a well-uniformed mob, not a single German ever involved.  

The shock and denial of French involvement has worn off; the difficulty is in keeping shock alive.  Paris is beautiful now, but beauty isn’t a place of escapism from reality.  It’s a real garden if and because it voices the reality of suffering. 

If this is Western civilization in decline, I’ll take it. On the one hand, France is in free fall; on the other, the effort of every moment to hold it together, to prop it up with baguettes as support!

Thus the proliferation of the baguette better and better, crustier, denser, with more breath holes like clarinets. The French are leaning on their strength, doing what they have always done in spades, only better.

Boulangeries make me dream; as with with poetry, I’ve never been a fan of rewards and prizes. I see awards and diplomas for third best baguette in Paris and wonder. Poetry and bread are the soul of culture, point zero, infinite nourishment. Breath holes. The two pillars of life, they outshine and outlast any medal.

Those endless questions pull the bobby pin out of reality; 
the willies,  blues, bad infinity

even the “shining truth” of politics —
nothing but a question

all stars in our flag become fifty questions
all past and futures held down by a moment.

Even Burnitdown— a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpie — 
has learned to reorient by following sensation.  
Her moment of doubt as recounted to WaPo:

I know I have this screw in my hand —
it’s poking my finger and hurts.
I am really here –
I’m pinching the skin on my forearm.
I know that’s a tree — 
it’s shading my yard.
Or at least it’s called a tree 
because that’s what I was told…

If vertigo is the only shared notion
this mourning/morning in America —
I’ll take it. 

Things incandesce.  Glow with heat, 
break into flame

as a water glass sitting on the edge
of a sunny table will alight 

and you’ll find this small burning thing 
wanting—

wanting — as prayer, as silence of the answer.  

So the doubleness of things, of words.
What does civil mean now

its cudgled emptiness
breakdown in definition 

enough to incandesce
in brother war

civil disobedience
loses its pact of politeness.

If it’s civil to leave newborns in a drop box

why not drop at her house – 
one, ten, a hundred?

Let the possessed with bionic eyes
remain apart, on a sun-struck table

to burn themselves out.

These are dark times,
Open the window, the sun shines today for 15 hours 10 minutes.  

And windy, 
a piece of lettuce is blowing off my lunchplate.

Gesundheit, 
we say to the sneeze heard through the open window.

On my summer reading list is “In Defense of Ardor”
and intention to pronounce Zagajewski

Ardor — heat of passion or desire —
in its air of noblity, 

I hear nostalgia, and an extended hand
to the future 

— to carry a torch for someone, for some thing, 

enduring strange beauty in words 
the scratch of magic, otherness, faith

to carry a torch for carrying forth

In spite of myself, my resentment that they are rats with tails, that they lounge in my chaises longues and massage themselves in the rims of my flowered pots, I have been admiring squirrels.

Such looseness; such fearless sense of play.  One — followed by her playmate — in motion leaps to her sure death from the roof but catches a frail branch, hangs belly-up as the branch dip low with weight until she rights herself, scrapes the bark with her nails — and darts.

Lilies of the valley have dropped their sweet white flowers, confetti is scattered around the hawthorn tree, the Dionysian rally of spring is exhausting —

but there are the squirrels, defying reason.

Once they’re hanging from a thread, how do they will themselves back? 
Do these masters of risk appraise a car tire and decide— uh uh,  not this one, over and over? 

And don’t these tricksters know these are dark times?  That destructive forces are overwhelming us?

And yet they play, play, play.  Before our tired eyes, they play, as if their very survival depended on it. If I banished them from the garden, who would remind us to play?

Light on the ledge of my lids
or is it the sill’s seepage?
From the trees, cacophony

the birds, no doubt
though I doubt —
a circus, pieces of a gambling

game being turned – 
clacking and sparring,
castanets, bingo.

The Creator as croupier? 
Each element in joy, in play,
the world depends on it.

We all came from mothers: we have something in common.
Our first act almost unspeakable 
hurtling towards bright lights, causing our Other shrieking pain.
Mothers let us off the hook — 
it wasn’t really our fault —
the pea-green stuff was cleared off, we sucked from the core of the earth,
nestled, smiled, were cutely dressed, learned the Hula hoop, read Nietzsche, 
or learned to shoot, worked EMT 
or spent years shooting hoops, opened a laundry

How ridiculous the way life steps in to scatter one ur-motherhood story
it cannot be mastered
as every “birth plan” and over-imposition will veer off course

Let each birth be
or not  
as it wants 

“Ambiguity is the world’s condition.…As a ‘picture of reality’ is it truer than any other.  Ambiguity is.”  So says poet Charles Simic.

In that spirit, I submit spring.  Yes, spring is a bouquet pulled and given from the dark dead closet of winter by a surprise lover — and yes, spring is a wide sky of clotted clouds and warty trees.  Yes, canopies of white cherry blossoms making the city street into a wedding lane, and yes, wondering if those branches that scratch the blue sky are dead or slow or what?  

Yes to Bermuda shorts and flipflops, yes to down vests with down parkas.  Yes to breath-scented bacchanalia; yes to depletion and childhood colds that repeat every season.  

Yes to People of the Book celebrating religious holidays like overlapping dinner plates; yes to fractricidal wars.  Yes to moral imperatives that command and consume us; yes to the audaciousness of hope.  Yes to too much, yes to breath.