The Most Lifelike

Paris was chilly.  It’s July.  We have a place on the Quay Henry IV with a view out over the traffic and the blowing plane tree leaves to the Seine.  We’re a little too far down stream to have the booksellers with their green cases to flip up and open shop.  But I can see Notre Dame. 

Of all the medieval cathedrals I can think of, it always seems the most lifelike.  Downriver to the southeast look back the head of the church rises up with a ring of mournful eyes to stare out across both banks.  But it is, of course the flying buttress ribbing that anthropomorphisizes the building into something more like an enormous whale carcass or a giant octopus risen up out of the river.

I sat on a rickety chair out on the porch of our apartment.  Some bop was in order and I pulled up Harold Land’s “Eastward Ho!” which fit the scene. And with the music to drown out the traffic three floors below, I wrote and considered where it is I was sitting, once again. 

But only for a while.  Restless, with everyone else still asleep, I went down to the riverbank and looked back at the impenetrable block of apartments that must have been built in the sixties with their faded modernity.  To get coffee and bread I ducked around the back to Boulevard Morland, named for one of Napoleon’s Colonels who didn’t make it home from the battle of Austerlitz. 

A shop for juice and fruit.  A restaurant that had been swarmed late last night was had but one other patron and I grabbed my espresso and sat out under an umbrella.  Two young paramilitary guards with menacing looking machine guns were standing, chatting, guarding something.  Restless again, I made my past them to the boulangerie and stocked up on breads and pastries to return to the apartment with.