PARIS 2011 - 2015 -

I am - Nursse. Je Suis - Infermier.

! No - clochar !  

Chantier Interdit Au Publique

! Ici - No - WC

PRIORITE ! - POLICE - ET - MILITAIRE -

France = PARIS

[Signage groping among charm-words.] At an impasse of the Seine walkway, which resumed on the other side of the Pont Royale, on the left bank, across from the Louvre, sat a two-room hovel, woven tightly of pedestrian partitions and tarp, cardboard and wooden pallets, its approach protected by two cordons of the same fencing and a generous helping of traffic cones. A narrow stair lead down from it to the grey, sluggish waters of the Seine.
  I met the owner. I was lovingly and ill-advisedly preparing to spend the night behind a heavy metal gangplank on the cardboard-soft cobbles diagonally across the river and the bridge from the shack. I had just seen some rats scurrying along the fake plage upstream, but I felt that they would scurry around me like the Seine around the avant-becs of the Pont. He warned me with a bicycle bell and approached with a flashlight, wearing a gendarmerie jacket, and said qu'est-ce que vous faites ici? but all trouble quickly passed. He was an affable, drunk, [out-of-work nurse] from Romania. He took officious pleasure in such things as shooing away drunken clubgoers from the pee-soaked hedges of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur or in giving directions.
  
 
  The Pont Royale was built between 1685 and 1689 during the reign of Louis XIV. It replaced a wooden bridge, damaged over and over again by floods, that had replaced, in 1632, a ferry. It was completed despite advisors' doubts à cause de la rapidité de la Seine qui, ici plus reserée en son lit et plus profond qu’ailleurs, y coule avec plus de violence, in the decorous explanation of one history. It was the second Paris bridge that never bore a dense load of houses. It gives onto the long vista of the Louvre, the museum-palace which, now a permanent feature of the city, [reached its present   in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Place du Carrousel, which was cleared of many close-pressed and varied buildings.]
  This new palace place was the scene of one of Baudelaire’s poems, Le Cygne, which contains the generous, anguished reveries set off in the poet by the memory of an escaped swan. Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie n'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie, et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. Memory is the private, oppressive-generative immovable in the midst of the city’s resistless change. La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel. [Burdened with his volatile memories, exiled in his native place, Baudelaire became  allegorical, sympathetic.] Devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime: je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime.
  The Louvre of our day no longer changes. It is kept on permanent display as a public immovable strictly opposed to the immovable that unexpectedly thrust itself on the solitary poet. A museum is not like memory.


  For three days in June of 1662 Louis XIV staged a great carrousel in the place, to which its name refers. The crowd of spectators is said to have numbered about two thousand. The king participated as commander of the Roman quadrille; the other quadrilles represented Persians, Turks, Indians, and Americans. The history of the word carrousel is contested, but the reference works in my cousin’s flat, where I was installed several days later, presented the following with straight faces.



Later the Nursse took up residence nearby. The pavilions
the colonnade and the feeble
barricade, are the dialectics of his choice, his achievement
of position. There is a wasp that lays in the bone of trees. The flexible
hollow spear, ovipositing, is the magic abdomen, the sharp tip
of the poem. The effort of centuries is a palatial agony. The effort
of the moment is an abdominal drill.