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Michael Heffernan
The Emperor
Everyone’s gone to Paris. I’m staying here.
I have to watch the daffodils on the lawn
trying to keep their faces from the snow
and wishing they could get up and go away.
Whatever they want to do, what anyone
might do, is perfectly all right with me.
What’s going on outside is hard to tell.
It may be turning into freezing rain.
Sometimes this place is hard to recognize.
Sometimes I can’t tell who or where I am.
I’m glad I’m not a daffodil. I’m glad
I’m not in Paris. I’m glad I’m doing this,
though what I’m doing isn’t obvious
even to me. I’m doing what I do,
and I don’t get it; so, with nobody
else in the place I’m in, it’s hard to know
exactly what I’m doing. Henry James
spoke from his deathbed to his guardian angel,
from a point of view unlike most other people’s
and in a mental circumstance completely
removed from what he’d ever had in mind,
about how “mere patchwork transcription” can
“become of itself the high brave art.” He thought
he was in Paris. What he thought he was
doing in Paris was even crazier:
he thought he was Napoléon, making plans
to decorate the Louvre and the Tuileries
with “a majesty unsurpassed by any work
of the kind yet undertaken.” I think he meant it.
He knew precisely who and where he was.
No one on earth knew who and where he was
better than Henry James. The part about
the high brave art of mere patchwork transcription
may seem a little antithetical,
especially for Napoléon Bonaparte,
but for me it makes a jagged kind of sense.
I’m noting down a view of springtime flowers
and freezing rain, which has begun to fall
on them and me. I don’t care where I am.
I’ll pull the collar of my old gray coat
snugly around my neck and observe the light
staggering down from sodden chestnut trees
onto the young Priests strolling with their books
in the straight alleys by my old friend’s house
one Sunday afternoon in early June.
Mad crows are calling me from the wind.
MICHAEL HEFFERNAN teaches poetry in the M.F.A. program at the University
of Arkansas, Fayetteville. On sabbatical leave in the fall of 2002,
he sojourned in Paris on his way from Ireland to China.
“The Emperor” appears in our Spring
2003 issue.
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