1.Sunday Bells

Sundays in Paris unsettle us with silence.

The grumble of traffic stays dream-distant,

an argument with the air in a language

we apprehend with our senses, its light fur

the only foreignness against our skins

when we wake.  With the curtains closed

we could be anywhere.

Doodling dialogues of slow shoes

under our windows: in the distance, bells.

Then the phone spins the world like a marble

Someone at the bottom of the globe

wants us back with them - - and suddenly

the heart of this moment is Sydney Harbour blue.

There is a red-bellied black snake crossing the road,

leaving the unmown grass beside the belling

agapanthus on our long footpath

towards yachts.  Its long rope tugs

a sonic boom...

Afterwards, turning our tongues toward familiar

translations of breakfast,

we sleepwalk the moonsurface of milk,

almost boiling for coffee.  Sunburnt croissants

from the three-minutes-away patisserie

peel like paperbarks over our yew-green floor.

A pigeon and a sparrow supervise sunlight

reluctantly at work on the stilled concrete

of the building site too-few wingspans

from our window.  Chilled wind

tugs early walkers toward private pilgrimages,

gasping up song scores, film posters--

exclamations from the past

piled on black stalls beside the Seine,

I open the glass for a gust

and as casually as a  cat slinking home, its fur

still warm with adventure,

my new neighbourhood shawls me

with the smell of someone, somewhere, cooking cake...

The phone roosts on the bookshelf, restless

as a pigeon.  In other people's kitchens

timers tick ... We tumble out --

rattling like falling crockery onto footpaths

underneath unexcited windows.  We tumble out --

swinging ropes of curiosity and hunger

into air which starltes us

within suddenly cold-as-metal skin.  Our voices chime

the emptied streets like churches between shifts:

It is Sunday.  This is Paris! ... Carillons begin.

2. Eloquent Coins

My face is wrinkled with worry like a walnut.

when I try to speak my tongue twists and numbs

as if it tastes something bitter.  My past

is turning in me,

so deep and far away -- all the knowledge

I only half-digested then

punishing me by refusing to recover

its unappreciated flavour.

All I want to pluck

from the glacial perfection

of an arty shop on the Ile St-Louis

is a Matisse calendar for next year

when I will no longer be here --

but already I am as insignificant in this place

as one grain of sand, and the calendar

opens and shuts before me like a delirious

desert tent.

Three Germans cracking their teeth on consonants

batter in from the echoing

cobbles.  They stop in a sibilance of "schoens"

before watercolour swatches of the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre,

Notre Dame ... All we take home from our travels

is a snip from the Big Picture,

and now, before gargoyle mouths

even their tongues are softened.

Their wrists reach, for a moment they question

one another.  Shy as schoolgirls they shrug,

wrongly rustling curtains

closing around them too.  When they leave,

no longer as radiant as red cabbage,

the shop thrums with silence, its space

stays fragrant as a just-emptied oven.

Behind his counter then I see the shopkeeper

thaw .. The Matisse cuts -outs twist

dumb colours into painfully joyful exclamations

between my hands

and his -- as he takes my tumbled phrases

and eloquent coins,

his ripe-date eyes

in the unexpected oasis of his face

sweetening my way towards his "Bonne journee".

3. The Language of Light

Weekends, Paris walks.  Something shifts

underground.  Like a Rubik's cube

slightly twisted

the lines of colours realign, the harmony of humans

gently shudders the city's symmetrical grid.

Like the still spaces we enter when music

moves us, weekends separate us from the deafness

of habitual days.  Move so than ever

here, on the other side

of our usual world--

here, where we live lit up

 like cymbals always on the verge

of being struck.  In the Luxembourg Gardens

I am one small vibration in the shivering of the city

toward some Sunday song.  The babble of all the world

is being quietened here --

Poles and Italians, Australians and Africans,

small boys and motorised boats all blend into a buzz

swarming from under the acid- yellow horse-chestnut leaves

toward the end of summer's silver briefly hived

within the lake.

Weekends, Paris talks with less tension

accelerating its tongue.  Even the tourist buses --

clattering outside the gold fleur de lys-spiked fences

like the abruptly dropped snakepods

of bauhinia trees--

release people who become,after a little time here,

as calm as seeds

waiting to be planted.  We almost believe

we could all belong -- as we settle briefly

on these wrought-iron chairs with their ringletted arms

and verdigris-barred backs.  We subside

on the tender circle of seats tattooed all over

with holes like punched patterns

of a hat-brim spraying sunlight

onto the crushed weary bones of white gravel below.

How many faces

have fallen here--

waiting for Paris light to persuade them

to float back up, to lift

towards it their first foreign shoots?

Weekends, Paris walks.  It stalks us -- as gently

as the grandparents we never knew, those ghosts

who passed through a war here

eighty years ago.

Like the nano-shifting of volcanic plates now,

something in us shifts.  Whatever homes we thought

we had brought with us

settle like hidden pockets

in the linings of our never-before-worn

winter coats-- and we join the lines

of stilled people in the black swivelling towards

the slightest caress of sun.. The light,

as it negotiates peace settlements

within this temporary country

of cold shoulders,

is speaking everyone's ancestral tongue.