Deborah Landau

from THE CITY OF PARIS HAS YOU IN MIND TONIGHT
February 13, 2015 Deborah Landau

from THE CITY OF PARIS HAS YOU IN MIND TONIGHT

 

When G died began the midnight panic attacks.

He spoke French and English

but that didn’t help.

 

How the body can betray.

It frayed and decayed and then

he was removed

 

from it promptly and with force.

To begin with, a bit of pressure

in the throat.

 

A tendency to choke.

And then how lavishly

it grew to overtake him.

*

At the funeral his wife

had a gaudy kind of beauty.

Sheer and elegant in a champagne

 

silk blouse. And where did he go?

No matter where on this earth

and you could never find him.

 

Flowery and young

came the mourners, like bridesmaids.

G would have liked it that way.

 

Stilettos and stockings.

The curves of the widow

sleek and sublimate in blacksilk pants.

 

Elsewhere people

went shopping or to the movies.

We drove to the crematorium.

 

I can only hope

so many beautiful women

come to my funeral, M said.

*

Just at the moment when the person has disappeared forever

they tell you he’s alive forever lucky him.

 

The church hushed dark a ruin

and all of us inside it.

 

(The city’s a brute the sky is a brute

though the day is calm and clear and mild

 

strain to comfort console

but there’s no dispersing this.

 

O incidental fragile beloved one,

chance of recovery none).

*

The mind rivers out, angle by angle.

He was sick and now nowhere

and soon the cities and soon the planet and yet

 

the decadence and festivals

boys running, couples

swooning on the bridge.

 

Tonight G’s attached to a city,

where I carry him along in my head,

ordering dinner, sitting in the square

 

drawing the sheet up over the body

that happens now to be lying there.

Deborah Landau is the author of three collections of poetry: The Last Usable Hour, Orchidelirium, and The Uses of the Body, which is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2015. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Boston Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Erotic Poems, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University.