Exclusive: From my private journal

September 17, 2008

And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
-T.S. Eliot, "A Game of Chess," The Waste Land

It is unfortunate that I don't write enough. Today a description of Satragne Square Park.

The park is off Boulevard de Magenta, where to the left a post office stands. The office is strange because of its red-brick that is ordered not horizontally, but vertically, an ugly effect. Government buildings of the latter half of the twentieth century are built without much thought to architectural aesthetics. But that fact, among all modern facts, is typical in these times.

The park has a plain entrance of two brick columns and a standard low-gate on which is pinned a no-dogs sign.

Just inside, two gravel paths run along a center planted with cosmos, sage and other annuals. Its limits are hedge. The paths open onto a cobbled square, but cobbled in a circular fashion around a fountain. In the center of the fountain, a circle of jets shoots up short streams that fall and flow down the sides into the fountain's gutters. Six or seven pigeons drink and wash from the flowing water.

Another path leads from the fountain to a small playground where children play and parents and grandparents watch. A little beyond there is an ecole maternelle.

Here I have read part of a novel and a couple of Eliot poems. Two men have peed behind the bushes from where I sat. I could hear the patter of urine against the hedge leaves. I moved to a bench in the fountain square.

The wind is picking up and shivering the trees.

I'll go now before I get uncomfortable.

Forget the things
between us
and intuit
the void-space, the
in-between and in-between-
in-between,
until an opaque
incomprehension
rushes to
the corners of our
eyes everything.

More at eleven!