When I was a young man still getting to know Mother’s family in Marseille, I found enchantment in the South of France, too, after having been raised rigidly in a military and Catholic household. Visiting the Maison Carrée—with its graceful edifice on a tall podium, with its single portico and six tall Corinthian columns, and with its rosettes and acanthus leaves carved out of limestone—I wonder if I didn’t see a metaphor for the sonnet, a form I love, with its mixture of passion and thought, its infrastructure of highs and lows, its volta and the idea of transformation, its asymmetry of lines, like the foliage of a tree over a trunk, and, most of all, its intensity. The Maison Carrée inspired the neoclassical Église de la Madeleine, in Paris.
“JE N’AI PAS LES YEUX EN FACE DES TROUS,” my friend Claire said to me today, meaning, “I do not have my eyes in front of their holes.” Since having cataract surgery, she has not been herself, so I coaxed her out of her lonely apartment, and over a warm meal she reminisced about her father, who died of typhus and dysentery in Bergen-Belsen just five days before it was liberated in 1945. Her father was a miner’s son, an unusual background for a member of Parliament. But as a schoolteacher near Albi, he’d fallen under the spell of the charismatic Socialist Jean Jaurès, a great figure of pacifism on the eve of World War I and an architect of the Socialist Party as we know it today.
Claire’s father was only forty-five when he died, and her mother didn’t learn of his destiny until after the Allied forces had defeated Nazi Germany. During the war, the Hôtel Lutetia, on the boulevard Raspail, had been a lair for Nazis in command, who were housed, fed, and entertained there, but after the liberation of France, ironically, it became a repatriation center for those who survived the death camps. Today, a discreet plaque commemorates this sad history and says that the joy of those reunited with loved ones could not erase the grief and pain of families who waited in vain for the missing.
Later, walking home, we stopped at a florist where a quotation from Rilke was prominently displayed: La racine a beau tout ignorer des fruits il n’empêche qu’elle les nourrit, which means “Although the root doesn’t know anything about the fruit, it feeds them.” Claire and I agreed that we feel this way about poetry—that we are only roots feeding a fruit, which is language, and we have no idea when or if the fruit will grow. Still, we feed the fruit, as a stream feeds a river.
MY UNCLE MARIUS, Mother’s older brother, loved canaries, and when he was eighty, ailing from a bad liver and nearly blind, his birds continued to delight him. He had seventeen birds in all—each with scruffy blue and yellow feathers—and their black, anxious eyes made me think of the randomness of my travels.
Paul Bowles, the American expatriate composer and author, once said, “Moving around a lot is a good way of postponing the day of reckoning. . . . When you’ve cut yourself off from the life you’ve been living and you haven’t yet established another life, you’re free. . . . If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re even freer.” I thought about this statement today at Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop, where I go often and ponder the pretty, sherbet-colored canaries.
Years ago, with my uncle Marius, I visited Château-Gombert, a small village northeast of Marseille, where my grandfather is buried with his cousin, one above the other in a crypt, as if sleeping in bunk beds, each with a little ceramic oval portrait on top of the tomb.
Near the end of the war, during the Nazi occupation, my grandfather loaded the family’s most cherished possessions onto a mule-drawn cart, and with his wife and children walked from Marseille, where they lived, to Château-Gombert to wait out the bombing of the city by Allied forces.
AT DEYROLLE there was a handsome nightjar, a bird I know from poems by Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson, a medium-sized nocturnal bird—with long wings, short legs, and a very short bill—that nests on the ground, where its feathers are camouflaged and resemble bark and dry leaves, making it invisible at night. It is also known as a nighthawk, whip-poor-will, or goatsucker. In Plath’s “Goatsucker,” she writes of the vulgar notion that the bird sucked milk from goats at night:
Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear
The warning whirr and burring of the bird
Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard
Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.
Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer
Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered
By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird,
Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.
In her diary, Plath wrote, “Spent a really pleasant afternoon, rainy, in the library looking up Goatsuckers. . . . I have eight lines of a sonnet on the bird, very alliterative and colored. The problem this morning is the sestet.” In her sestet, Plath rehabilitates the “ill-famed” bird (with flat head and overly big eyes that are necessary to see in the dark) that “never milked any goat.” Like a naturalist, Dickinson carefully observed flowers, animals, and birds. Her poem is more cheerful than Plath’s, and in fascicle 12 she gives it the title “Pine Bough.” It is one long sentence:
A feather from the Whippowil
That everlasting sings—
Whose Galleries are Sunrise—
Whose Stanza, are the Springs—
Whose Emerald Nest—the Ages spin—
With mellow—murmuring thread—
Whose Beryl Egg, what School Boys hunt
In “Recess”, Overhead!
Dickinson had probably found a whip-poor-will feather, which brought on a meditation about the nightjar, in French called engoulevent—coming from engouler, meaning to swallow, and vent, meaning the wind—because when the nightjar flies it opens its mouth wide and swallows the wind to catch all the bugs it can. In English the nightjar owes its
