torch-song

le mur est flambé...
a singed serenade...
a flamboyant flash-point...
a flecker flare-up...
a blistering blaze-burn...
a scintillating scorcher...
a grilled grimace...
a concerted combustion...
a pyromanic putsch...
an incisive incendiament...
a contingent conflagration...
an arsonic-laced annointment...

really just another innocuous and inflamed wall somewhere in the glowing heart of pyrexial Paris...

scaling the wall

an abstract symbol composed of snake-scales and bark-veins inflicted onto a blank concrete wall conveys serpentine stasis in segmented curves...
a statutory juncture to contemplate the confluence of sinuous biomorphic skin and static architectonic membrane...

[Rue François Miron, 4e Ar.]

les tuiles céladones

missing my building with the celadon skin on rue des Solitaires, I find another off the rue de Belleville...
another céladonique moment, so to speak... but covered in a web of tiny sea-green tiles that also brings back my need for the sea...
the simple pseudo-modernist design with the plain metal tubing railings is nevertheless enlivened by a pair of ornamental flourishes bracketing the entrance canopy...and the mysterious giant silver spider still guarding the balcony above...

solitary man

one quiet Sunday morning many years ago, I biked by this building when it was a soft celadon green colour...
the white shutters were grimy and the naked young man posing intently above the front door could also have used a bath...
with the sticky surrealist ghosts of Aragon and Breton prodding me on, I was silently beckoned towards this solitary entity hovering above the rue des Solitaires as if...
"Life itself has summoned into being this poetic deity which thousands will pass blindly by, but which suddenly becomes palpable and terribly haunting for those who have at last caught a confused glimpse of it."
[Louis Aragon in "Le Paysan de Paris"]

I recently returned to catch another glimpse, and was relieved to find him still in situ, but considerably spiffed up to seduce younger and more excitable paris-feasting eyes...

sans tête

missing more than just his head, this bottom-third statue of Saint Nicolas still drapes the hems of his flowing robe over a corner niche on the Ile Saint-Louis...
carved onto the stone above the street sign and faintly legible is the more ancient former name of the street - Rue de la Femme sans Teste... perhaps sans tête is more appropriate now for the decapitated St. Nic - and much more intriguing than the present name...
[the older street name apparently alluded to another ancient sign depicting a headless woman holding a glass in her hand, meaning what exactly no one has quite deciphered, even with an inscription of "Tout est bon"...]

"a horse did whinny..."*

at the grand portal doors to the barracks of the Garde Républicaine on Boulevard Henri IV hang a pair of enormous lanternes... sometimes when I walk by, the doors are open and I can glimpse one or two horses being exercised around the grounds... sometimes I just hear them whinnying from within, and I hear again this song that I have heard so many times within my own home...

"a horse did whinny in the afternoon - he had no pity for the old buffoon...
a horse did whinny in the pale sunlight - he had no eyes, he had no insight...
a horse did whinny, or so I was told - he had nothing else to befoal...
a horse did whinny and that's a fact - he had nothing at all to give back...
a horse did whinny, but who cares...
a horse did whinny through the air...
a horse did whinny in the middle of the day...
a horse did whinny as if to say...
go away...go away...go away.........go away..."*

[*lyrics from "a horse did whinny" by my son Enzio (copyrighted 2008), as performed by his very cool band "Half-Chinese"]

objet suspendu

it hangs heavy like a giant silvery spider, but staying quite still above the balcony...
it catches my eye as I am photographing the building - I zoom in on this araignée grise and marvel at its elegant design, its mysterious purpose, its decorative placement beneath its thick wiry web... waiting oh so patiently for an unsuspecting prey to come along...
I am still in suspense as to what kind of spider it is...

[really, what is this thing??]

pot-of-iron in repose

like a hollowed out pumpkin "round upon the ground", it reclines "gray and bare" on the step of a neglected tomb...
"it did not give of bird or bush"... its angle of repose betrays a state of rusting dissipation, a dirge to its complete disengagement...
soon it will be removed altogether, perhaps repaired for sale by a wily brocanteur...or discarded into a cauldron of melting iron, sparking embers into the dark, dark night...all the while "[taking] dominion everywhere"*...

[*quoted lines are from Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of a Jar", 1923]