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Québec City

For all this time, in the long forgotten streets,
I have become lonely for who I am, Québec. 
Behind me the indifference of television quivers
neon blue conveying the ration of daily news. She cites statistics and laughs through arrogance 
at a dream which haunts the awakened to their dreary supplication, facing yet another day. 
In my dream-filled eyes I seek the meat 
of the infinitesimal, circling back toward 
the infinite in so small a place as this 
cup of English breakfast tea. Cakes
layered in white frosting badger me from
the chromium tray, angry for the whim of my neglect, eager to enter into cellular intercourse
over which is the more toxic supplement.

I lean out the window to a squadron of dead 
insects littering the sill, toward the renewal
of morning in yet another foreign city. Sounds
of birds in the naked trees, wet pavement, 
cobblestone, lazy wisps squeezed through chimneys,
an illusory sun filtered through the cheerless dawn. A couple embrace on the hotel steps and
the doorman tips his hat to the guest in a black taxi. Across the plaza a solitary figure in a long wool coat smokes a cigarette. On the St. Lawrence
the rusty iceberg of a ship is immaterial in the distant river mists, steadfast, alien, timeless.

Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot make wake-up calls. I know Sunday morning; mine is the love song at middle age; I know half-deserted streets and evenings end like patients etherized
on a table, loveless at so opportune a time.
I know Death is the Mother of Beauty,
and I know what it is to place a jar in Wilderness; how lithe that form defines what surrounds. Skipping past the slate roofs a fog horn calls over, over, over, unconvincingly, 
and this day passes as any other day as night 
descends like ink spread across my papered life.

In the dark room the window square of light
looms against formless lamps and curtains.
Guitar players in the plaza below the hotel
gather a dallying crowd of those who fear 
the idea of empty rooms, frozen dinner, 
and the tedium of their internal dialogues.
Canadian television purveys pornography:
the housewife spreads her legs on the naked matress, citing columns of grim statistics, 
while two carpenters disrobe from behind.

On a room service tray a single lilac stem
droops in her vase like a parenthesis around
an argument of incidious intent, lost, her
fragrance a memory, a ghost of nose.
The man in the mirror stares back through
ragged eyes, a nape of scalp glistening 
through a comb of hair, hunched like a dead
flower in a cracked vase, dreaming of youth
spent unknowingly, like all the foolish young.
Scuttling cars like scarabs search the sea,
prodding mermaids singing for no man, nor me,
as the waves combed back on perfect strands
the tall white cliffs near Chateau Frontenac.

Waiting. Listening to conversations in other
rooms, murmurs that succumb to rushed silences,
stolen affections, that infinitesimal meat
we so desire. And across the plaza in a 
bakery they toss loaves on the fired brick
of purgatory, purifying what has been separated
from chaff. Gideon's Bible speaks from the
drawer of the nightstand beside the empty bed.
The electric lights dim to the order of distant
prerogatives, dynamos unable to meet demand,
And sleep comes like opprobrious guest.

© Copyright 5-25-99,  C Marcus Parr.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.