'Paris Alive': A Poem Written By The Seine
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The improbably green River Seine, as captured under the Pont de la Concorde. 75007 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
Paris Alive
indecisive rain, fiercely tender
or tenderly fierce,
fills the widening between my steps
and the words we unsoftly said
the Seine so improbably green
promising depth it doesn't have
the weight of my wet clothes
easy to mistake for the weight
of the world, but the menthol air,
the rain applauding on the river,
the light that splinters through
trees that shiver liquid pearls
I catch in my hair, in my everywhere
it all tells me to hold on
the catastrophe of hopes half-fulfilled
will map new dreamlands very soon
because that is the circle, the circle
of doom joy grievance gain and loss again
ruthless rude alive
- Winter Bel
'Winter Bel' is the pen-name Lexia Snowe uses for poetry and literary fiction. You can find out more about Winter Bel projects at WinterBel.info.
Notes from the poet (Lexia Snowe writing as 'Winter Bel')
Writing poetry is usually a very formal, almost ritualistic, process for me (I always write at my desk, always in intense silence, and always immediately after waking up in order to tap into what David Lynch calls "dream logic"). From time to time, I like to do an experiment, in which I release myself from all that formality and instead write a poem in a public place, typically tapping it out on my phone as I walk along. Because pecking at phone keys is no fun, capitalization and punctuation tends to get ditched. And because I'm composing in my head, without having the infinite mixing board of a notebook in front of me, the language and flow tends to be much simpler.
I call poems I've written in this way "foot songs", because they were written on my feet and because they tend to draw on the musicality in words more than anything else. I've yet to write a "foot song" I feel is good enough to include in my collection, but they are cute enough, and interesting to me as reminders that there is no one way to be creative. (And that a fixed way is probably the worst.)
Paris Alive is the "foot song" I wrote alongside the River Seine on my final day in Paris. Nothing about it is autobiographical except for the drenched part, and even that I lifted from other days (it wasn't, in fact, raining that morning). In real life, there were no "words we said", and no "catastrophe of hopes half-fulfilled". I suppose I simply felt that, if I were going to experience catastrophe, I'd want to do so in the Paris summer rain, when nothing feels permanent or permanently awful.