Filth

Los Angeles poet, Cecilia Woloch, helps us see the "dirtier" side of Paris from another point of view . . .

I love the filth of Paris, I love Paris in its filth. Even stepping off into Passy, in the elegant "sixteenth," I can taste the soot in the air, a black curtain billowing after the train. And the woman who offers me petits fours, pretty petits fours on a plate - I love when she pulls her dainty chair away and lights a cigarette. How the gilded room fills with smoke and she disappears in it, crossing her legs.

And I love the café "Au Chien Qui Fume" on boulevard du Montparnasse. How the light is yellow, worn, and the waiter's shirt has not been ironed. And La Petite Chaumiere in the crooked, damp Marais where we've come for fish. How we heap the bones on a plate, the open-mouthed heads, the thin gray skin. And how my friend insists on paying, but there is nothing romantic in this. On the street, I blow him kisses, step over dog shit, laugh out loud.

And in the station at Hôtel-de-Ville, there's a couple across the tracks. The man sitting down in an orange plastic chair; the blonde woman facing him, straddling his lap. She is kissing his forehead again and again; he closes his eyes and lets her kiss. Her sweater slips out of the waist of her jeans, exposing the small of her back to us: a seam of pasty, naked flesh; the elastic band of her underpants.

I get off the Métro a few stops early to walk up the Champs-Elysées in the rain. A drunken man shouts from a telephone booth; blue lights flash down the boulevard. And I swear a woman is squatting to pee between parked cars just below the Etoile. She's wearing a mink coat, stockings and pumps; has a small cocker spaniel on a leash. I want to shout, "Bravo, bon courage!" as she totters away just ahead of me.

Paris is beautiful like this; it's the beauty of love of the body of love. Once I arrived here in winter, alone; smelled bread and tobacco and butter and piss. And what had, until then, been my heart was not so much broken as opened in sin.

Copyright 2001 by Cecilia Woloch

About the Author: Cecilia Woloch has published three books of poems, Sacrifice, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem and her new collection, "Late." A celebrated teacher and a well known poet on the Los Angeles scene, she's the director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild, a week-long celebration of poets and poetry in the San Jacinto Mountains of southern California each July.  She also spearheads the Paris Poetry Workshop every spring in Paris. Her books can be purchased by visiting our pages of books.