This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys by Connelly Karen

Author:Connelly, Karen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE000000, POE011000
Publisher: Brick Books
Published: 2012-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Journal without dates:

from Paris to Honfleur to Caen

Mannequins chatter on the lovely streets.

The Seine droops waterless, swirling rotten hair.

The Eiffel railway runs a foreign-cattle boxcar

one quarter of the way to heaven.

Hear the tourists bellow delight.

In the Louvre, the delicate Japanese stare

and stare, appalled by Rubens' lolling women.

Outside, in the courtyards, pigeons swoop ominous

as ravens, and dirtier.

The monuments stink of cat piss.

On the streets, we see the frenetic copulation

of the moment on history's soiled bed.

I leave with my hands, catch a ride

from Versailles with the dream of tall trees in my mind.

The first night I sleep in a field and wake up

just before my skin turns to mud and wet leaves.

Grass grows with my eyelashes.

I find mushrooms in my hair.

The next day I walk forever through fields.

My feet cry like pink kittens.

Within ten hours I drop deep

into the loneliness of freedom.

I talk to the grass, the little rocks,

the distant figures of women bending in gardens.

I sleep in the tight shell of my body

anywhere, without dreams, losing memory on the grass

like a snake who writhes away her dead skin.

My lies become historical.

I walk through strawberry fields inventing

elaborate tales of orphanages, seductions, deaths.

The land's memory rises up through me,

turning my brain's black soil.

Sometimes I remember the wars

and wonder if I am stepping

on a dead man's heart, or his hand,

or the shadow of his shattered eye

shrivelled like a grape.

Who died here? I whisper in twilight's ear.

The sky inks out a crimson scroll.

I walk and walk, barefoot sometimes,

the mellow flesh of mud thrusting through my toes.

After a while, I know I amble

through a painting I've seen at D'Orsay.

When I meet the road a century later,

I throw a black stone over my shoulder.

I put out my thumb.

The price of a ride with a stranger

is words, a little fat,

a bit of hair, dry paper:

anything that can be burned.

Remember the body is blooded wood.

Strangers, I say to myself, climbing in.

You are no one but a stranger.

Forget the exhausting habit of tenderness.

I look at the window and instead of my face,

I see his, the reflection of a knife-edged nose

and white-gold hair.

Smile, smile.

I am Danish, he says, I am

going to Normandy, to the sea.

This is romantic enough.

As soon as I close the car door,

everything begins.

* * * * *

We leave the living behind.

He drives away from those green valleys.

Lives are folded lovely in lace

in little houses, fingering polished forks.

We drive away from the yellow-blue gardens,

children's voices, simple bees.

But I think to myself: be thankful.

I can already smell the deep openness of ocean,

already feel my skeleton sink through water.

The Dane's eyes grow bluer and bluer:

bits of sky snared in a round bone.

The price of a ride with a stranger

is skin, or words.

The man tries to pry me open like a mollusk,

digs through the soft flesh,

searching for my pearl of hurt.

I tell him nothing.

I pretend to forget where I come from.

How did you learn to speak French? he asks.

Have you ever had a lover who died?

Did something bad happen to you in Paris?

I think for a moment of Camille, and tell him,

I discovered what a beast Rodin really was.

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