Naked Poetry

Poetry in Paris wasn't hell. It was smaller than that and uglier. Decent people with their loyalties and their corridor hatreds.

And everywhere the same poorly hidden fear. That a real poem might arrive. Just one. That it might walk in without apologizing. And bring everything else crashing down.

I was one of them. Not as a tourist. I knew how to strike the right tone. That slightly weary tone. I knew when to furrow my brow while reading.

I'd become competent. They called it taste. Standards. Discernment. It was fear. Everyone knew it. No one said it.

Then the letter arrived.

It came from a northern town the papers never mention unless a kid goes missing or a man hangs himself or a factory closes. The name alone already carried rain. Brick. The wastelands behind the warehouses.

The envelope was almost gray.

The boy said he was seventeen. Rimbaud.

He'd enclosed three poems.

I opened the envelope standing in the hallway. I still had my coat on.

I read the first text between the console table and the umbrella stand. After a few lines something shifted in me. I leaned back against the wall.

It wasn't even what we called poetry in our circles. There was something naked in it. A way of letting into the sentence what we spent our time keeping out. The filth. The shame. Desire when it has neither modesty nor form.

One image arrived too early then another, unbearably precise, and you understood that this boy could hear something we spent our time covering up. Nothing was polished. Nothing was trained. And yet it breathed.

I read the second one sitting on the floor.

The tile was cold beneath me. Someone was coming down the stairs without greeting me. A dog barking behind a wall.

And in the middle of all that, those sentences.

The boy didn't yet know what he was doing. You could see it in every line. He was drowning in excess. He was short of air. But he moved forward with a necessity that nothing around me possessed anymore. Me neither.

Language in him didn't seem manufactured. Torn out. That's the only word.

I didn't read the third one right away.

My hands were shaking. It made me angry. Not at Rimbaud. At my hands. They were telling the truth faster than I was.

I went inside. I sat down at the desk. Mathilde coughed behind the partition. The boy made that wet sound children make when they sleep with their mouths open.

And I wrote to him.

Not a long letter. No advice. I had nothing to teach him and I already knew it.

I wrote his name.

Then a single word.

Venez.

I held the letter for a moment. The ink dried.

I looked at the word. Venez. A nothing word. Five letters. It meant something else and I knew it. It meant everything people like me don't say because people like me end up in prison or in the papers. My body had known for a long time. Since the too-long glances at fifteen. Since the nights lying awake next to my wife thinking about things I couldn't have named.

I sealed the envelope.

He stepped off the train one September morning. I was on the platform.

My first thought was petty. I thought no. Not him. I'd already begun the legend. Since the letter. Since the poems. You always begin the legend before meeting the person. It's safer. The legend doesn't stink. The legend doesn't have mismatched laces. The legend was easier to love than the boy.

He was too thin. Too tall all at once, as if his body had grown without warning the rest. An unfinished tallness, all bone, almost hollow in places. His jacket hung loose on him. His shirt collar had a gray mark. He carried a half-deflated bag.

His shoes were wrecked. One white lace and one brown lace.

And then there was the face.

Young and already worn at the same time. You could see he came from far away. Not by the kilometers. By what he'd looked in the face too soon.

Under his nails there was dirt or grease. When he came closer I caught the sealed smell of the night train. I pitied him. For half a second.

Then something else. Not pity. The thing I'd held back for years stood up in my gut like an animal catching a scent. The boy had a dirty neck and collarbones showing in the open collar and I looked at that one second too long. I had to drag my eyes back up by force like yanking a dog on a leash.

There were people on the platform. Porters. Families. I corrected my face. I put an extra half-step between us.

We walked side by side to the end of the platform without a word.

He held his bag in his hand instead of putting it back on his shoulder. He barely looked around. Paris didn't dazzle him.

I finally asked:

— Is this your first time in Paris?

He nodded.

— Yes.

His voice wasn't beautiful. The voice was forty years old. The body seventeen. It came from a place the body hadn't reached yet.

We took a few more steps. Then he said:

— I tried twice before.

I looked at him.

— To come here?

— Yes.

— And?

— The gendarmes brought me back.

I asked him:

— And this time?

He looked at me straight on.

— This time you invited me.

He pulled the bag strap back up on his shoulder.

— It's not a runaway anymore. It's a summons.

I said nothing. I'd written venez. Venez is a word you don't come back from.

He slept at my place. The couch. Two nights. The third night the couch stayed empty and nobody apologized for anything. That's how you recognize inevitable things. You don't apologize. You don't negotiate. You don't name them.

In the morning I got up before him. The bathroom. The razor. The mirror. I searched my face for whether it showed. What we'd done that night was a crime. Not a metaphor for a crime. The penal code. Judges. Walls. My son's name in people's mouths.

His desire was nothing. Mine was the crime. That he'd wanted me didn't change a gram of it. That I'd wanted him made everything worse.

My face was the same. That's the worst part.

I checked the lock. I opened the door an inch and looked at the landing. Empty.

Then I thought of his bare back in the bed behind me and I knew I'd go back that very evening. I didn't care. And that's what scared me the most.

It had a face and a smell and I woke up at night with that smell in my throat.

I need to say something.

Rimbaud had nothing. I had everything. The apartment. The name. The circle. He had his poems and a pair of wrecked shoes.

Truth had its share. I paid for the rest in gestures. A man who lies a lot tidies a lot. I cut the bread. I heated the water. I held the world in order so I wouldn't see I'd broken it.

Mathilde moved from room to room. She held up what I'd already left from the inside. Not the house. The idea of the house.

It came through objects. His toothbrush next to mine. His shirt on the back of the chair. His neck bent under the kitchen tap when he drank. He drank like an animal. Head down. Water everywhere.

He left on things traces of nothing. Almost shameful ones. But the room shifted around them. As if the furniture had stepped aside.

He had a power over me he didn't know. The power of unfinished people. Rimbaud was unfinished and he didn't care. He walked around with his lack out in the open. And it forced me to look at mine.

It became a system. When someone rang I had fifteen seconds. Toothbrush in the drawer. Shirt under the bed. Second glass in the back of the cupboard. In fifteen seconds the apartment became a single man's again. I'd gotten good at it. At making someone disappear from my life for the time it takes to open a door.

Erase a person. Open a door. In that order.

One afternoon a colleague came by. Rimbaud's sock was sticking out from under the radiator. I put my foot on it while we talked about Baudelaire. The limp proof under my sole. Under my foot was Rimbaud. Above was Baudelaire. One foot on the truth and the mouth talking about something else.

That's what it is too. Socks you step on.

I erased Rimbaud several times a day. In the morning for the concierge. In the afternoon for visitors. In the evening for myself. At night he came back.

The dinner took place a few days later. The back room on the second floor of a wine merchant's where we often went. I'd brought Rimbaud without warning anyone.

Someone asked. I said a young poet from the North. A talent I'm mentoring.

— How old is he?

— Seventeen.

The silence after the number lasted a second too long. Then the conversation resumed. The number had stayed on the table like a spilled glass no one wiped up.

I made sure there were two chairs between us. Two chairs is the distance that says nothing. To those who want to see nothing. But the room was full of people who knew how to read between the lines. It was their profession. I'd brought Rimbaud into a room full of readers and hoped they wouldn't read.

He sat at the end of the table. He said almost nothing. He ate little. He drank fast.

A man everyone slightly feared launched into a reading that wouldn't end. They listened politely. Then a woman read. Very well. Too well. Then another. None of the poems were necessary.

Rimbaud stayed at the end of the table with his glass. Mouth closed. Not looking intimidated. Elsewhere. A body too thin with dirty hands and a wild syntax.

Then someone asked him if he'd brought something.

He stood up.

He pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper folded in four and unfolded it slowly.

When he started reading his voice didn't change. It didn't become more beautiful or bigger. That's not what happened.

It was the room that changed around it.

The words he read hadn't been polished to enter that kind of place. They entered anyway. With their weight. Their poorly restrained violence.

There were still clumsy parts. Collisions. Shortcuts too abrupt. Something compact and dark looking for its form as it moved forward. The poem moved forward. It didn't have its form yet. It didn't care. It breathed. The boy had simply found nothing to put between the world and himself. And the world came in. He read the way you bleed. Without meaning to.

The faces around the table. The attention that had become something else. The bodies in that room were pulling back. They listened to Rimbaud the way you listen to something that might make your own language insufficient.

When he finished no one spoke right away.

He refolded his sheet. The same care as before. The same child's gesture. He put it back in his pocket. The gesture was small. What he'd just done to the room was immense. The gap between the two was Rimbaud. He set fire and then put away his matches.

After that everything went fast and very slowly at the same time.

A savage to show off. A raw youth from which everyone could draw a bit of prestige. Above all annex him.

But when talent looks at you like a lie the party's over.

He was already drinking before he arrived. In Paris he began to drink with an almost workmanlike application. As if alcohol were one more job. He insulted those who housed him. Those who desired him. Those who admired him. Especially those.

He found in each person the exact place where the pose touches shame. He didn't hit people. He revealed them.

Rimbaud wasn't pure. He lied. He manipulated. But he had one thing none of us had. A freedom. Dirty. Real. And that freedom made our prisons visible.

I needed him dirty to feel clean. Needed his black hands so mine would look washed.

He could be cruel. Unjust. Puerile. Abject. He made those who came near him pay debts they hadn't taken on.

One evening during another dinner everything gave way.

There were a lot of us. Too many. The air was short. A respected man stood to read. Published. Awarded. Well settled in the small sovereignty of his name. He began his poem.

— To live, the question consumes me, ember beneath the skull's ash, To live, is to chew the dark and swallow the raw day.

Rimbaud was drunk.

He walked up to the man. He climbed onto his table. He unbuttoned his trousers with an almost calm slowness. No one moved right away. You always believe a scene like that will stop on its own. Out of decency. Logic. A return of reality. That's wrong.

Then he pissed on him.

On the sheet he was still holding. The paper drank before the man did. A quiet stream.

There was something in Rimbaud's face that was neither joy nor anger. Something desert.

The man remained standing.

He was still holding his text.

Rimbaud let out a groan.

They grabbed him. They dragged him down the stairs. They threw him out.

I was sitting.

I stayed sitting while they pushed him toward the door. Stayed sitting while they shouted. Stayed sitting when the humiliated room began talking too loudly to give itself back its dignity.

And when he vanished into the street I finished my glass.

To stand up was to follow him. To follow him was to declare myself. To stand up was to say in front of that room what you don't say in a room full of men in 1872. It was to lose the name. Lose the circle. Lose the son. So I stayed sitting.

My legs knew what they wanted to do and my head knew what it would cost and my head won. My head always won. That's why my poems were mediocre.

Writing didn't leave him all at once.

The sheets stopped drifting across the table. In their place came the bottles. With the patience of mold.

The bottle stayed. Always there. At the appointed hour. On the table. Under the chair. In the sink. In the bag.

One evening we were in the kitchen. He was drinking. The bottle between us like a third guest more solid than either of us.

I said:

— You don't write anymore.

— No.

— Why?

He shrugged. He lifted the neck of the bottle to his mouth before answering.

— Because I tried to eat a poem the other day and it doesn't fill you up much.

— Rimbaud.

— What Rimbaud.

He looked at me with a vicious tiredness.

— Words, Verlaine. Words are for people who have a roof. People who've eaten. People who have a stove that draws. You can put cold in your sentences because your feet are warm. You can write about rain because your roof holds. Me, when it rains it rains. There's no metaphor. There's water on my back and nobody at the end of the road.

— You have talent.

He gave that short laugh tired people give.

— Talent. That's your way of giving nothing while looking like you're giving something. The charity of the rich. The coin tossed from the window.

I said nothing.

He set down the bottle.

— Not me. There's no hallway for me. No waiting room. No distance between the thing and me. The thing comes and it comes right into my face. And I've got nothing to slow it down. No furniture. No walls. No books. No name someone says to remind me I exist. Nothing. The thing comes and it finds me naked. And naked doesn't last long, Verlaine. Naked dies fast. Keep your talent. Give me a coat.

I wanted to protest. I didn't.

He went on, lower:

— Besides, you need guys like me. It puts blood back in your mouth. Then you go home and write about it and suffer a good spell and that gets you a few more pages.

He smiled.

— Pages about me.

He set the bottle down again.

— It's not me you're hiding, Verlaine. It's you.

I said nothing. He was drunk. He was cruel. He was right. And the three together didn't cancel each other out.

One morning he was gone.

No note. No scene. No door slammed. Nothing.

His shoes with their mismatched laces were gone from under the radiator. Under the radiator was the dust the shoes had hidden. And a button. A shirt button. Small. Off-white. Fallen one day from a shirt and no one had picked it up and the shoes had covered it and the departure of the shoes uncovered it.

I hesitated. I took it. I put it in my pocket. It stayed there a long time. A button is not much.

If Mathilde found it on a Monday emptying pockets before the wash. A man's shirt button that wasn't from mine. The exact size of proof. Not enough for a court. Enough for a wife. I thought about what I'd answer. I found nothing.

I kept the button. It's the only thing of Rimbaud's I didn't hide.

It stayed in my pocket for weeks. I touched it with my fingertips through the fabric. While walking. While talking. While Mathilde told me about the boy.

He left for Africa to sell guns. He didn't write anymore. When someone mentioned his poems he said it's garbage.

He died at thirty-seven. Cancer. They took his leg in a hospital in Marseille.

The poems stayed.