"...TO MAKE MUSIC THAT WILL MELT THE STARS..."
( For Ray of the Pools )
So, here we are
in Flaubert's garden
as if he has just
gone in and
will be back
in a moment.
We wait for him
to return
chat amongst
ourselves
intimate
with his very thought
having travelled
through his mind
and not mere
summer tourists.
We feeling we have
just stepped out from
a time machine and
a servant informs us
we have just missed the master
who had been called away.
We pass his photograph
with his melancholy gaze
"...it seems to me,,,"
it whispers as we past
"...that the rain is falling
through my heart...
,,,causing it to crumble into ruins.”
We return to his rooms
the mummified heads
stare back at us
through glass
screaming silently
"We were once like you!"
A fly argues
with a window pane
much as it did
a hundred years ago
time lost
between the tick and the tock
but now the sunlight
grows old
and outside the 21st century
awaits
angry at our escape
into another time.
I shush it
with a wave of my hand
“There is not a particle of life..."
I tell it
"...which does not bear poetry within it”
Musee Flaubert et d'Histoire de la Medecine
51 rue de Lecat, 76000, Rouen,
Flaubert's house but also on show...two mummified heads in a glass case, a full mummified body in a casket in a glass case, the skull of the Marquis de Sade and some plaster death masks of criminals that were guillotined!
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert
“Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November
I wrote this after Ray Pool gave me a copy of Madame Bovary which I had last read when I was 12 so I needed to read it this time around as an adult. It was the writing on both occasions that got me!