Chicory in Paris, 1808
Madame Endive’s
receiving.
She forages
for subtleties, hands a cup
to the general, wooden-legged on the parquet:
given time,
you could develop a taste for it.
When he blows
he’s coaxing a fire in the desert.
The taste is quarantine, caffeine
redacted,
opaque as the city’s deepening sleep
when eyelids flicker
with the moths in the Bois.
A far-flung commission’s one cure
for the lethargy:
rain falling in veils
on the frontier or, better,
a wilderness
where dunes and the mind
rearrange in the night.
Luke Heeley
(From Herbarium, a new poetry anthology. Launch and reading 22 July)
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