Mahogany-leather, Les Jeux Grenier, and Poetry
I’d been struggling to write for what felt like ages, and in the end all it took to unjam whatever was stuck in me was a couple of hysterical tempests and a few episodes of Sex and the City. Entirely predictable, I suppose.
This morning on the subway, a man sat with a beautiful mahogany-leather journal open to a single page.
His gaze never shifted—not once.
It was as though he’d fallen into that page, as though something inside it had seized him.
What could it be?
An old photograph? A letter written in ancient script? An expired coupon? Is that a porn?
When he finally removed his glasses, something in me slackened; an invisible thread gave way, and fatigue washed in.
It’s going to be a long day—my weekend won’t begin until Sunday,
and it’s still Friday morning without coffee.
On Saturday night I’ll go to Les Jeux Grenier, the small indulgence I grant myself almost every week.
I’ve been returning to that café for nearly three years now.
It has its own peculiar charms: souvenir ashtrays worn pale by other hands,
the steady comfort of a hot black coffee.
And then there’s that odd painting on the wall, the one you can see from the counter seats.
At first I thought it was a watercolor of a naked woman and a dog, framed in plain wood.
But now I think it’s a dead woman and a man—transformed into a dog—standing beside her with a kind of ignorant malice.
I remember how I couldn’t look away.
Somehow it was enough just being there, without a book or even a sudoku puzzle.
My mahogany journal.
Is that a porn?
Les Jeux is close to the gallery, so I drop by sometimes after work.
Coffee and cigarettes never tire me, nor does the strangeness that rises unbidden in my mind.
But there are rules for the objects that genuinely interest me, and sometimes they completely go over my head.
(Coffee and cigarettes stay loyal, but thoughts arrive on their own terms.
They crawl in and begin making rules. Ah—system!)
Nothing shiny with a very glossy surface.
Nothing evokes the nostalgia of broken heart.
(Beware the trap of nostalgia. Only imagined nostalgia remains alive;
the nostalgia of experience fades and distorts like Pan’s Labyrinth. or that’s what all the love is about? Jesus.)
Stay composed.
Objects must carry the echo of long-ago hands, and they must be the ones to speak first.
Wow. I just realized this might be the clearest definition of poetry.
Maybe I should go back to wearing glasses instead of contacts. I never tire of looking, anyway.