Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

to square the barricades, the FFI, the jimmying of rocks

     from boulevards –

those appareils of Baron H’s anti-communista vistas –

     with Papon

or Pétain; the sandbags, the barbed-wire, the rifle cocked

and gripped, incongruous – a hand-me-down four-quarters

     violin

resting on the shoulder of some prodigious tot –

     and the trains

trundling out of Drancy, the gendarmes waving au revoirs.

And then, come to think of it, the only part of the plot

     of Baldwin’s

Another Country I remember – Yves, I think, remarking

     that all

Americans are racists, exhibiting his Gallic amour-propre

and here, on the Boulevard, this black woman pushing

     white tots.

How indeed. The bakers fill the street with un parfum

     of buttered wheat;

a pregnant beggar slumps near-by, slowly starving.

Downriver, Les raboteurs awaits my rapt attention.