Two Poems

By David Kirby

 

The Demimonde

                              I’m not so much walking as tilting a little to the left and falling
forward and then tilting to the right by way of compensation
                              as I make my way down the Rue du Temple in Paris sometime
             after most but not all of the bars have closed, and at one point

                              I slip halfway in the open door of a club through which
a beautiful wild-haired woman is slipping halfway out,
                              and as we disentangle, she grabs my face in both hands and says,
             “Qui êtes-vous?” and before I can answer, I think

                              so this is the demimonde, a word I encountered in my early teens
and which I thought then described a locale where I would
                              have been right at home, though it took me years to learn that
             “demimonde” referred not to a place but people. Theirs was

                              a half-world of drink, drugs, gambling, promiscuity; the rest
of the world both envied and disapproved of the demimondaines,
                              who managed to float above the squalor of ordinary sinners
             in large part thanks to the vast amounts of cash they spent

                              to maintain themselves in haute couture, servants,
houses in own and country. The wisest of them invested
                              at least some of that wealth against the day when age
             took its toll and their looks faded, so that they ended up

                              well cared for, if alone and, not ugly, exactly,
but certainly less toothsome than they were once.
                              Tibetan Buddhists believe in a world they call the bardo,
             which is like the demimonde in that it is halfway between

                              one state of existence and another, though in this case,
death and rebirth rather than respectability and sleaze.
                              In the bardo, you meet all sorts of creatures: gods, heros,
             imps, sirens, temptresses. The bardo is like the demimonde

                              that way, that is, a fun place to visit because of all
the interesting characters you meet yet a world that’s easier
                              to enter than it is to leave and one that is, in the end, perilous.
             Yet are we not always between one place and another,

                              as when, on June 7, 1968, you were watching an episode
of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with your kids,
                              and Lady Aberlin is blowing up a balloon, and Daniel
             Striped Tiger is worried about her because he sees

                              that she’s emptying all the air out of her lungs, but Lady
Aberlin says it’s okay because she all she has to do is simply
                              breathe in again, which is when Daniel Striped Tiger says,
             “What does ‘assassination’ mean?” A day earlier, Bobby

                              Kennedy had been shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel
in Los Angeles while campaigning for the presidency,
                              and now Lady Aberlin is saying, “Have you heard that word
             a lot today?” and Daniel Striped Tiger says, “Yes,

                              and I didn’t know what it meant,” and she says, “Well,
it means somebody getting killed in a sort of surprise way,”
                              and he says, “That’s what happened, you know? That man
             killed that other man.” Actually, Kennedy was shot on June 5

                              and didn’t die until the next day. Where was he in the hours
between, and who? Not in this world, and not in the next.
                              I hope you were dreaming, Bobby. I hope you were playing ball
             or sailing, the sun so bright that you disappeared into yourself.

                              I’d praise this world if I thought it could hear me: “World,”
I’d say, “thank you for telling me everything I need to hear,
                              even if I don’t always listen.” Other people are stumbling
             in and out of this club now, and I know I’m not

                              in the bardo and that the people are real and not ghosts
and that it’s nothing more than the wine and the exhaustion and the late hour
                              and the mist coming off the river and the boat horns
             and the bump-bump of the beats from the club’s overloud speakers

                              as the beautiful wild-haired woman takes my face
in her hands and again says, “Qui êtes-vous?” as the streetlights bend
                              slowly toward me and then pop upright
             and I try to clear my head and I look at her and say, “No one.”

 

 

Whatever Happened to Gino Romantico?

                  In Carmignano, we try to find the bakery that makes
                                these famous cookies we’ve heard of, and finally
we meet an old timer who tells us that the bakery
                  is closed because the baker is ill and not expected
to live, and the old gent sighs and crosses himself
                                and looks off sadly for a moment at the fields

                  just outside the town limits and then chuckles
                                and says, “Actually, I know a bakery that’s better,”
and off we go to the other bakery, but not before
                  I think of a guy we used to call Gino Romantico
whom we used to see outside the English building
                                when we were students, and he was handsome

                  and tanned, and his hair was perfect, and there
                                was always a girl with him, and she was laughing,
and the next day it’d be a different girl,
                  and she’d be laughing, too, and we resented him
yet were drawn to him, and the girls were, too, but nobody
                                knew his name, so we called him Gino Romantico,

                  and a year later, he wasn’t there, so we used
                                to ask ourselves, whatever happened to Gino
Romantico? Whatever happens to anyone.
                  Melted like snow, says François Villon,
from Héloise and Blanche of Castille to Joan,
                                “that good woman from Lorraine / whom the English

                  burned at Rouen.” We called him Gino Romantico because
                                he looked Italian, like Primo Levi, who really was Italian,
who survived Auschwitz and wrote If This Is a Man, the best book
                  about the camps, and who died later in mysterious circumstances:
one morning in 1987, he was found at the base
                                of the stairwell of his building, having fallen or jumped

                  from the landing on the third floor, where he lived.
                                Levi suffered from depression, and the police thought
he took his own life, but here’s the thing: for him,
                  Auschwitz was actually a positive experience
because it gave him a reason to live. He himself
                                called the camp his adventure, his university,

                  his “time in Technicolor.” Primo Levi was depressed
                                before and after Auschwitz, but not while he was in it.
We know less about François Villon, only that
                  he was born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared from view
in 1463. Between those years he killed a priest in a brawl,
                                joined a gang of thieves and stole 500 gold crowns

                  from the chapel of the Collège de Navarre, and was in
                                and out of prison for these and other crimes, yet somehow
he became the best known French poet of the Middle Ages.
                  And then what? He may have died in some cheap tavern
or in a cold cell or in a dark street in a little town
                                or perhaps, as he always feared, on the gallows.

                  We’ll never know, whereas we know that
                                Primo Levi survived Auschwitz largely because
of a bricklayer named Lorenzo Perone, who was not
                  himself a prisoner but one of the camp’s many
civilian workers and who smuggled two liters of soup to Levi
                                every day, without which he would have died.

                  Soup and friendship: these saved Levi’s life
                                and may even have let him see that there was
a force of goodness greater than the will to power,
                  that the Nazi shadow was only temporary, that there
was light and beauty beyond its reach. In Carmignano
                                we make our way past the church of San Michele

                  and down the Via Bellini to the address
                                the man gave us earlier, but there’s no bakery there,
though a woman waiting for a bus tells us the bakery
                  we want is two streets over in the Via del Castello,
so we go around a bend and up the wrong street
                                and turn back, and there at last is the bakery

                  we’ve been looking for, so we buy a couple of bags
                                of the cookies that are supposed to be better than the ones
we’d hoped to buy in the first place, and even though
                  it’s a cold day, we sit outside on a pair of little chairs
and open one of the bags and take out a cookie each and bite
                                into it, and you say yeah, these cookies are really good.

 

David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest poetry collection is Get Up, Please.