Paris by Night

Collin Brennan

Then the fear that life is merely one
thing after another, a cartoon bubble
to make sense of the image

which surrounds it. Then the sense
of movement in the eye as she maps
a blue-grey portrait of the street from

incidental lines, or asks the
architecture to hold her close and moves
in for a kiss. Then the rain

and subtitles – reminders that the film
we’re in is foreign, the weather still
a spectacle observed in silver

frames. Then the splattered balcony,
a mess of paint where cartoon bubbles
ought to be. Then the knotted

iron railing on which our hero/subject
leans to contemplate two centuries,
one defined by space, the other time.

Then the coming out of captions, everywhere,
a bursting forth from l’Étoile of text.
Then the Naked, then the Radiant City,

a poem of which each movement is a word.