I visited Notre Dame Cathedral
and
was taken to the Seventh Heaven,
where
Saint Paul was mending tents.
He
had made errors in his zeal to condemn
rattling,
world-weary bones whose only sin
was
to have eyes of cinder and rock.
He
needed to make amends
by
the sweat of his brow,
the
long labors born of Eden.
A
French waitress died in my arms.
It
could have been from a broken heart.
No
one really knew,
although
the final verse
she
offered as poetic prayer
to
her cannon of observations
was,
“The man in the beret!
The
man in the beret!”
I
saw a young boy with eyes
of
robin’s-egg blue, pale,
launch
a sailboat on the pond in the park,
sad
that it sailed away to the New World.
It
was there that shamans wearing beads
wondered
if their lives were at an end
because
a strange white cloud skimmed the horizon.
It
certainly was. The moon died that day.
At
an outdoor café, a comfortable cliché,
I
read some poems by Robert Bly.
They
were short and simple and very nice.
And
so I wrote this one.
I
hope you are in the Seventh Heaven, Robert,
but
not stitching the sins of canvas tents
that
housed a bit of soul.
You
did not make the same mistakes as Paul.
Perhaps
if he had visited Paris
and
kissed a French waitress, sans beret,
he
might have had a smoother edge.
~William Hammett
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