Poems by Sarah White

Decameron

Boccaccio hoped his book 
would be read by lovely women alone in their beds. 
Each of his tales would leap like a cat 
onto a lady’s coverlet, then twist this way and that 
to invite her caresses on its belly and back 

Like the story on Day 2 of Paganino da Monaco, 
a pirate so attractive and sexually active 
that the young bride he steals,
 when “rescued” by her elderly husband, decides 
to stay with Paganino on his illegal ship.  

Lately, the work of a poet who was sweet 
on me, as I on him, has been waiting 
on my night stand. 
Any minute now, a poem may land 
on my covers and begin to purr.

 

Ode to Noses
                 (in memory of Edmund Melhado and his brothers )

I am seventeen and go to Spain where I stare
at men with Spanish noses, Spanish chins.
While Madrileños do not seem 
to mind the gaze of a strange girl, 
what they do not comprehend is that
she’s staring at the nose and the familiar chin 
of a lost father and his lost brothers, 
whose Sephardic features must 
have traveled centuries ago from Portugal
to some town distant from a Catholic King 
and Queen, and, later on, across the ocean 
to the Caribbean where they begat the grandfathers 
of her dear father, who is lost, and of his brothers, 
five uncles, two or three of whom she knew when she was small, 
but now they too are lost—some from sickness, some from war.
In life they did beget some of the handsome noses, handsome chins 
I find in Spain when I, who lack 
Sephardic features, as I lack Sephardic prayers and lore, 
visit the capital to see the Prado, 
but, before I view the paintings (they are my prayers, my lore), 
I admire another hombre de Madrid who’s not amazed
to have a foreign girl fancy his Spanish face.

 

Where is Baudelaire?

Edouard Manet's painting of Baudelaire's burial

In Montparnasse, le cimetière,
I seek a plot where Flowers
of Evil grow alongside Little Poems in Prose.
Who knows? (I did find blue-eyed Becket (Sam) 
and his wife Suzanne. I found Sartre, 
Jean Paul, and Simone, his good friend, near
the main gate, where visitors leave articles 
for them to read, and partly smoked Gitanes.

Workmen trimming shrubbery ask
“Qui cherchez-vous, Madame?” 
“Je cherche Baudelaire.” 
“Just over there and down a little stair.”
True: a shaded nook: the poet
Charles’ name, engraved, the name
of Caroline, his mother, and, hélas,
in larger letters, the stepfather the poet couldn’t bear.

Général Jacques Aupic must have paid   
to place the family stone. Charles, first 
to pass away, amazed lovers of lyric 
but died with only centimes in his purse. 
His visitors feel none the worse for that. 
They leave wine bottles, outdated metro
passes and a mess of fading flowers
in deference to his grandeur.

Manet in person painted Charles’ burial— 
fogbound, ill-attended
tribute to the Great Flaneur, prophet 
of Paris and its woes. May he sleep soundly.
Merci, General Aupick, well -to- do beau-père
Merci, Caroline, mère with such allure,
Merci, trimmers of the trees, 
you know everything I need to know: 
hidden paths of Montparnasse, 
gleaming pearls of literature.