Le Week-End

~

Midday and still cold

bitterly cold 

stinging nostrils and earlobes

cutting, steel grey under a weak sun.

November at Sacre-Coeur

the uneven pavements white

fractured by ice, treacherous.

The starving artists mistakenly

took you to be Luciano Pavarotti

and made an embarrassing fuss

each wanting to draw you.

We four wore long overcoats

well below our knees,

reminiscent of your father’s

railway greatcoat that you purloined

for those beatnik sixties poetry readings.

We sat outside like mourners 

nibbling delicious gougeres and 

blowing steaming hot chocolate 

constantly pestered by students

one who resembled Francoise Hardy.

I should have paid her 

To let me just to sit there

and look at her beautiful face.

Later, at the Musee D’Orsay

we saw her again sketching,

I bought her coffee from the brasserie, 

Sacre Coeur bathed in the last glow

of a weak russet sun, was

framed by the café’s circular window,

a perfect cameo.

That evening dining in Maigret’s restaurant,

one of the many in Paris,

a delivery of fresh morels and chanterelles

were carried straight past our noses 

and changed food forever.

~

© Graham Sherwood 05/2019