Angie Estes

Cache

Here lies a hectic site, la Cité

tête-à-tête with the Seine

while Notre-Dame goes on rising

like the heel of God’s boot.

Ancient Roman isle, river

flung around it like a lavender

orchid lei around a neck: here lies

the new moon with the old moon

                              in her arms. Voici the sheer

leers of else, ready for hire.

We filled the room

with stargazer lilies, the scent

of a sentence when it’s ready

to speak. Relevant: the nuns folding

from relevé to grand-plié

as they touch the stones

in Saint Gervais then kiss

the tips of their fingers

while worshippers lift

their arms, saguaro cacti

lost in the dark

or longhorn cattle swaying

in the nave. Here lies

cash, lire, a sachet of sighs: pay

to the account of I’ll: yesterday,

here, hier and ici, the icy ache

of ich. You taught me

tart grammar, how to keep

thin slices of apple on edge

in crème pâtissière the way words

remain en pointe in a poem. Write

to me here: Dante@Kimosabe

Author: Angie Estes

Angie Estes’ seventh book of poems, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, is forthcoming in 2025 from Unbound Edition Press. Her book Enchantée won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poets, and Tryst was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A collection of essays devoted to Estes’s work appears in the University of Michigan Press “Under Discussion” series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry (2019).

 

Plume: Issue #30 December 2013