A “beautiful high-colored” French woman gets poor toadish bedraggled
ruined Henry’s blood flowing again. Good for him. She must have been something,
even more beautiful than his pale, beautiful wife, he says. (Wait a sec…Did he
think she was never going to read this poem? Just wondering…) I generally keep
this sort of rumination to myself, though I remember talking in this same passionate
way with my friends about girls in high school and middle school. We all still do
it occasionally. Somebody told me a gay acquaintance was talking about me this
way. I took that as a compliment. I actually opened up this way with someone at
a faraway conference, mainly to gauge his response, which was so flat that I
shut it down pronto and marked to myself that he probably wasn’t going to make
the grade as far as intimate friendship material. It was embarrassing. Other
times with more trusted friends now and then. All in confidence, all in good
fun, all in appreciation of the wonderful beauty our fellow human beings can embody
sometimes. I remember seeing more than a few women in France worth talking
about. If there are no close friends to confide in, then you publish a poem
about it and mark her down as striking and lovely for posterity. Yvette with the
poetic ankles, this would have made her day, I think. She’s French. Les françaises have a reputation of
being cool, culturally, with this kind of thing. Vive la différence!
And yet this sense from B: "I guess I won't be having sex with her."
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