“Booksellers Along the Seine” by Edouard Leon Cortes
(The opening lines appeared in my earlier poem “Nosegays.” But they stuck in my mind and so I give them a fuller story here.)
cracked-leather mustiness
seeps from dry bindings
I rescued from tumbling
dust covered stacks
crowding bookseller stalls
hung from medieval quays
overlooking the Seine
from Rive Gauche where
sweet sleep is no proper
companion of night when
young poets old painters
and passionate lovers
perform their best work
in fin de siècle garrets
whose earthiness settles
in seams of stale smoke
revolution still sweats
in the mist stealing
over dry friable sills
caught in cracks of
dead candlewax clumps
lifeless flowers in
hammered tin vases
smell moldy beside
acrid turpentine cups
oily palettes of pigments
intended to breathe
life back into the colorless
stiffened thin stems
mean decades of meals
made of river fish
sautéed in garlic and wine
sour linens that hide
under beds with glazed
chamber pots masked by
dried sprigs of herbs
tacked onto footboards
journals of love stories
reeking with loss that
inspired sad scores of
unfinished novellas
discarded librettos
but poetry oh how much
poetry hangs in the
vapors of lampblack
from India inkpots and
long since dulled quills
that excite to a flare
nostrils savoring all
of the human condition
that tainted these attics
where once my new
purchased old books
lived their well-used
existence collecting
the heady aromas of life
(originally posted January 2014)
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