We'd had lunch already, but I wanted to see what goat meat looked like, so we stopped in next door to the Somali place on St. John Street, where the old butcher obliged. It's bright red, & sinewy. I asked how he cooked it, so he brought us behind the partition where there was a restaurant you'd never guess existed from the outside, like an African secret, no awning or façade. He talked Abdellah into giving us a scoop of meat & rice, for free. To taste, for free. Free to taste. It was anti-American, that's for sure. The music pleasing, & the television entertaining men at three tables. We sat down with our cache, my woman explaining her vegetarian ways, but willingness to try the rice, which she complimented as tribal faces beamed back. I stuck a finnif in his hand early on, so he brought some tea, & explained, in answer to my wife's question about the sign 'Camel' outside, that no, here they have only goat, but back home, if a woman gets married, the dowry is paid in goat or camel. Delightfully anti-American, & downright exotic for an afternoon, snow in the offing, & most everyone else heading to the mall.

My reluctance to choose York Street didn't last long, at first simply finding myself there, then deliberately heading up or down, what with the light slanting just right, it must have originally been a ridge above the harbor. Then, the native grasses in front of one house & an empty lot, most of which I can identify by name, which gives added pleasure: timothy, yellow & red foxtail, along with a solid stand of Joe-pye weed in full bloom. Today I chose it on my way back from the farmers' market up on Congress, where I purchased a couple of pots of dahlias, my favorite flower. At the corner of York & High, after reminiscing delightfully about the Guadalajara & Mexico City flower markets, recalling too that dahlias originated there, the sun was turning me toward it, pressing viscerally against my skin. Suddenly some of my recent readings made complete sense. Without going directly to the pages, it had to do with language's ability to harness drives, drives that are at once aggressive, destructive, & potentially pleasurable. According to Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language there's a lot of repression going on regarding those drives, but that some few poets, (she cites Mallarmé & Artaud), are able to let the energy speak for itself. She calls the space of reverberation prior to language the chora, & the inevitable end product, 'art,' is derived from the act of a word that has always been close to my heart: aesthetic. That's it. Standing there on the desolate corner of York & High, my senses deriving a truth out of the haptic touch of the sun, the image of the grasses I knew I'd see along the next block, & the dahlias.

Though it reeks of it in that grand sequence of prose poems, Paris Spleen, Baudelaire uses the word prostitution only three times. He seems to equate the phenomena with generosity of spirit, a creative sharing of the self with the crowd. I suppose most of us are secretly fascinated by it, through our propensity for idealization of it as much as that for Love. In one piece of his, The Beautiful Dorothea, sun beats down on everyone in the seaside town. At noon dogs yelp for mercy from the heat, but Dorothea, cool in her billowing dress, as if the waft of air were a wave of water. Walking, she's working. In Nice once, as a young man, I watched my own independent like a study for weeks. Her routine, clockwork. A five-day week in fact. At 11:00 sharp she'd roll out her rattan mat on the pebbles of the public beach. Red bikini, black, white. She's etched in a young man's cortex exactly thirty-five years to this coming summer. Classically Nicoise, dark, petite, she may have come from a long line of ladies & sailors. I was always close to her on the beach. No one ever approached her there. Not a Soul. She never entered the Mediterranean. Drank water, perhaps a piece of fruit. Certainly never read, but the sun, the horizon. At 1:00 she'd put her white shirt back on, gather her mat, ascend the stone stairs home. From the bar on the street she owned, I'd watch her stroll from the corner halfway down the street, then back. Many men, some as young as I, approached, talked, made offers. She was selective, or expensive, I'll never know. If I was jealous, it wasn't of the men, but of Baudelaire himself, who'd written his woman into history. More than speaking to her, more than touching, I wanted to transcribe her grace, her spirit that cannot be wizened with time, my anonymous woman married to the sun & wind of Nice, I desired what I have here.