Barbara Crooker: Climbing the Eiffel Tower at Night

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CLIMBING THE EIFFEL TOWER AT NIGHT,

flood-lit, so the traceries of girder and beam
seem insubstantial, a conjurer’s vision,
an airy web spun out of light. It’s a pyramid of X’s,
row on row of kisses curving up to the sky,
meeting at the vanishing point, where all things come
together.

Premier étage:
We climb into this ladder of light.
Below, the sycamore trees have stripped
down to bar and girder, a complicated fretwork
of branches, dropped their leaves
in a heap of gold on the ground.
The sinuous loops of the Seine
wind around their feet,
wrap the city in a silver ribbon.

Deuxième étage:
Dizzy with height, for a moment things reverse,
and it’s the night sky spread below us,
darkness pooled at our feet, pierced with
different constellations, a new mythology.

Troisième étage:
This high up, the air is cold, clouds go racing by.
One minute the lights wink out, the next, they’re back again,
the clouds whipping around our heads like a dancer’s gauzy veil.
We kiss, wrapped in scarves of mist, the lights go out again.

At the top of this thin edifice, a single needle,
like the sweet momentary joining of flesh.


~~~

LES FAUX AMIS
(another name for false cognates, French words that
resemble English ones but have very different meanings)


Not the ones that are easy to confuse, like journée (day) and journey (voyage)
or cave (wine cellar) and cave (caverne) or the ones that are harder,

brassière (baby’s vest) and brassiere (soutien-gorge), magasin (department store)
and magazine (magazine), but the friends you thought were yours, just a phone call

or e-mail away, but weren’t. Or the double-crème fromage that now raises
your cholesterol or the vin rouge that puts your head in a vise the next day.

How many betrayals (les trahisons) do we have to endure? There’s the editeur
who receives your best work, only to send it back with “sorry”

scrawled on every page. Does it sound better in French, “Je suis désolé?”
Which is not to say desolate, inconsolable (inconsolable). There are consolations

in this life, children, cats, chocolat. You can rip those slips into a thousand pieces,
la neige, let them pile into drifts in the compost with the broken eggs and orange peels.

And while there are friends who whisper down the alley, who don’t return your calls, holiday cards, who drift off, cendres from a campfire, fumée in the wind,

there are more who remain: les roches dures, vrais bleus, loyaux, fidèles.

~~~~

Copyright Barbara Crooker. From Line Dance (Word Press, 2010)

Barbara Crooker’s many award-winning books include Slow Wreckage (Grayson, 2024). She lives in Pennsylvania.