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UN PERMIS DE SÉJOUR
DANS LE MUSÉE DE L'HOMME On the first floor there is matted newspaper left by the flood, dried out now, nilotic bathing beauties compacted with the undecipherable roster of the war-dead, the missing in action— all those whose exploits Homer mis-heard or mis-reported; on the second, a sibylline speak-your-weight machine contemplates the rust-stained urinals and keeps its counsel, while around the tired black Steinway in the deco colosseum of the cocktail lounge, eviscerated sofas sprawl. For a while I lived on the twelfth, leaving when all the drawers were filled with crushed and dusty birds, their plainsong snotted in their nostrils, and trying first the eighteenth with its leathery library and hurdy-gurdies and then the twentieth, abandoning there a lifetime's accumulation of books and chairs and shoes, seeking both Lebensraum and quietude. Yes, I have been to the top. I went as high as the staircase goes, to where the concrete walls had broken like biscuits and the girders gave onto smokeless air. Of course, the tower goes higher. Like charred bracken-fronds on a swealed hillside after a month of rain, twisted I-beams reached into a stratosphere that no longer had anything to say. To me or anyone. You, too, would have hurried down to pore through blank manuscripts, to sway to muted saxophones, to converse with dumb machines. You, too, would have smiled and smiled but, watching your children sleep, would have bitten your lip till it bled.
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