"Asleep, Paris" by Sheryl Noethe

1.
I am standing in the streets of the Left Bank in Paris
watching the refugees paint a mural across the sides of
several buildings. It is called, The Exodus of Kabul
and to look at it makes you want to weep. Beside me
my friend wears black leather and sports a butterfly
tattoo on his throat. He reaches his arm behind me
and without touching me touches me deeply.
I am watching the movement of the colors, from the
stream of Afghani people out of the mural into Paris.
I look at the street signs and the buildings, the activity
of the Parisians and I say the same thing to myself
that I say each of these nights in Paris –
Memorize Everything.

2.
I get a job in a bistro where I haul buckets
up huge stone steps from the basement.
I am a spectacular busgirl. Soon I am promoted to
hostess. I sashay table to table and never forget a
face. As my French improves I take reservations
over the phone. I do numbers, dates, last names.
I wake up in the morning repeating the days of the week.

3.
I find a hotel that will rent me a bureau drawer to sleep
inside and that is my room. It tucks away. In the day
I can walk Paris memorizing street signs. I have a vague
concern that my flight home has left.

4.
I sit at a table with an old lover and two women.
As dusk approaches the women pull long black scarves over their hair
& then the sky, too, is black. I awaken, saying, I will get a scarf.
In one gesture I will pull the sky across my hair.

5.
I have a felt hat with two brims. It is the same purple as my lipstick.
I sit in a bar called La Pêche. The bartender winks at me.
I wink back at myself in the mirror. In my hand I hold
a brown paper bag full of cash. This time, Paris . . .
I step into the bathroom and wash my bare feet in the sink.

6.
Outside it's raining. I see the bar's name in pink neon.
I look up into the dark Paris night and say impermeable.
There is a man at a cash machine who wears a brown hat and
trench coat. He is entirely familiar. Happily, I walk toward him.

7.
I look up pêche in my French dictionary. Sometimes
it means peach, sometimes sin and it can also mean fish.
I look up impermeable. It means raincoat.
Party of two, Thursday evening, eight o'clock. Springtime. Here with me,
asleep, in Paris.

© Sheryl Noethe, from The Ghost Openings. Grace Court Press, 2000. Nancy Shapiro, publisher.
photo by Ricardo Bloch, from Amphibious Andromeda

Sheryl Noethe's As Is: On Beyond Heidegger

First of all: I took some pleasure in writing that header (which my husband, the philosopher, will appreciate).

Many thanks to Lyle Daggett for noting in a comment to yesterday's entry that there is now a web page about Sheryl Noethe's new book, As Is. It offers an updated bio of Sheryl, which includes this information:

Noethe resides in Missoula, Montana at the foot of Mt. Jumbo with her fearless husband, a firefighter, where they keep a household of rescue animals, including a one-eyed feral cat named Mike Tyson. She is filled with gratitude.

There is also an intriguing review of the book, by Joy DeStefano. Here is a teaser:

As Is Unlike All : Read it and Weep

Sheryl Noethe, poet extraordinaire, has achieved with her recent collection "AS IS" a triumph of the Unconscious made Conscious in a language unlike all contemporary poets with similar aspirations. For reasons we cannot pretend to understand, Noethe has tapped into the collective Wounded Unconscious of our time—its failures and most telling traits—into our frightened, battered, spoiled, dishonest, pretentious, corrupt, terrorized and disillusioned claims to know what is real and immediate, intimate and necessary, false and true. We are wrong and unable to confess our sins. We have lost the language of Confession. Noethe exposes the malignant narcissism that was wiped out the Lost Language of mercy. It takes a courageous artist like Noethe to do what we cannot do, as individuals and as a society on the brink of . . . On the brink.

Later in the review, Stephano quotes Heidegger: "The Terrible has already happened":

Only Noethe really understands what that means. What Heidegger was unable to explain, Noethe has eloquently painted—our painfully post-apocalyptic laboratory of shame and redemption. In terms we cannot fail to understand (much as we resist, squirming, squeamish), Noethe speaks as our Queen of Broken Dreams; our Queen of the Failed Resistance. Only in failure do we find redemption.

Now I'm off to order the book. (I love the cover, too.)

Poet Sheryl Noethe

Poet Sheryl Noethe, winner of the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award, has a new book, As Is, coming from Lost Horse Press. (The book is so recent it's not yet listed on the publisher's website: follow the link above to inquire.)

Here is a bio of this remarkable, under-read, ever-emerging and enduring writer:

Sheryl Noethe is both Artistic Director and a writer-in-residence for the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She is co-author of the teaching text Poetry Everywhere, reviewed in Kliatt and English Journal as an informative and tremendously valuable resource for teaching poetry, now in its third printing. A recipient of a Montana Arts Council Fellowship, she also has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the CutBank Hugo Prize in Poetry, the Emerging Voices Award from New Rivers Press, a McKnight Prize for Literature, and an American Academy of Poetry Award, as well as an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2004 Cultural Achievement Award from the Missoula Cultural Council for her work in Missoula schools. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and she has published two collections of poetry, The Descent of Heaven Over the Lake (New Rivers Press, 1984) and Ghost Openings (Grace Court Press, 2000), which won a Northwest Publisher's Best Book Award. Her latest collection, As Is, will be published by Lost Horse Press in 2009. She teaches at Hellgate Middle School for the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

I knew Sheryl years ago, when she and I gave our first poetry reading (with writer Mary Karr) at the Weyerhauser Chapel at the campus of Macalester College. I remember creating a broadside with a drawing I made of 3 women pouring water from a jug out a window. While I eventually stopped trying to make my way through the world as a poet, Sheryl continued on that arduous path: transparency – and a life in poetry – is not for the squeamish.

Lyle Daggett has written a thoughtful, very insightful tribute to Sheryl, talking about the impact of her work on his own, at his blog A Burning Patience. I am not surprised that Sheryl continues to inspire children and others to write poetry: she has a spectacular gift for that. She has co-authored a book with Jack Collum called Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry in School and Community. She says "Writing is a grip on existence, an empowerment, and a way to listen to the inner truth of the self. " It's a way to pour water out of a jar, out of a window, into the road, to see where those rivulets go..

Lyle's piece, "The weight of dreams", takes you to a few of Sheryl's fluid, incandescent poems. (They mention water, too, it turns out.)