At two am the revelers pass infrequently,
their foreign phrases broken by the cars
that stream on rainy rue Rachel
for me to count in lieu of sheep:
one…eleven…twenty-seven….
shadowy impatiens creep upon the shades,
a maple glows beneath a streetlamp, bright as day.
Perhaps the décafiné was not?
The bedtime reading, too intense?
Heel-clicks on the trottoir, then
a woman’s laugh, a man exhales and sighs --
while my unsleeping eye
blinks through its own eternity,
roams the dark internal skull of night,
considers finite days that rose and disappeared
like cars on rainy rue Rachel.
(note to English-speaking readers: this poem needs the French pronunciation of Rachel - as in "ra-SHELL")
Do you know the story about how Les rues Rachel et (is is Maryanne?) got their names?
Posted by: Scott | July 22, 2007 at 06:08 PM
No! Please tell! (And yes, it's rue Marie-Anne.)
Posted by: beth | July 22, 2007 at 07:08 PM
Fascinating image, and a great poem on a subject close to me. Thanks Beth!
(But the way, the above comments and other related lines appear with cross-out lines across them. Hope my commetn makes it through.
Posted by: marja-leena | July 22, 2007 at 08:27 PM
I have no idea what's going on with these lines. Any help out there?
Posted by: beth | July 22, 2007 at 09:00 PM
About Rachel and Marie-Anne.....once upon a time, a
farmer owned that land between those two streets.
You know the stone of which the mansions downtown,
around McGill, are constructed? Well, in order to transport
the stone from the quarry to the building sites, an
agreement was made between the farmer and the
construction engineer. The agreement was that the builder could have the land you live on - if he
agreed to name the bordering streets after the farmer's two
daughters, Rachel and Marianne. Isn't that wonderful?!
Posted by: Scott | July 22, 2007 at 09:54 PM
Me last night. Beautifully put, Beth.
Posted by: Dick | July 24, 2007 at 02:08 AM