Tonight's Poet Corner: Ooh La La

Ooh La La
by Belinda Roddie

Once, I laid eyes on a girl so
beautiful, she stopped my breath,
crammed it into a jar as it stayed
suspended in mid-air, a perfect
freeze frame for the cinema. Ideal

for our tête-à-tête, our rendezvous,
our secret ballet that we danced with
pirouettes and plies - don't watch us,
sil vous plait. Have you ever noticed
that when you talk about love, you

dunk your entire head in a basin full
of French? All the beautiful whims
and fancies of a Romance language
that can't count from seventy to
one hundred properly. The words

make your head spin because you
think the meaning of your message
is stronger when you have vertigo.
You don't consider the fact that you're
just dizzy. Swooning over her as you

sip your aperitif and adjust your chic
beret and you imagine yourself in
a film noir, and the femme fatale
struts toward you, all haute couture
and pretending to be an ingénue.

She smokes, because of course she does -
it's what the genre expects - wears a gown
as slim and slinky as the motif demands it
to be. Coils her brunette hair into winding
staircases with mousse. She winks,

lets her eyelashes dance like a cluster of
crazed peacocks flaunting their flair,
and you get déjà vu - or something like
that. How am I doing? How's my accent?
Is it adequately stilted, dried out, as edible

as cotton during a heat wave in été? How
much am I making the Parisians cringe, and
how badly do the unlucky souls in Lyon
want to feed me to an actual lion? How
fares my personal arsenal of vernacular

that we English simpletons swiped from
a country that gets ignored for its revolutions
and instead regarded for its perceived passion?
The ones who serve the avant-garde like cheese
cubes on a platter don't always get their ideas

from heartache. The bourgeois gaze
at art with glazed eyes and think some
sap with a tormented soul mixed his
paints with carnal fever. He uses red
to convey his tumultuous émotion -

or maybe he just wanted the girl's
dress to be red, I don't fucking know. I'm
not leasing out space in that guy's head;
I can't afford the rent. But I'm very good
at going online and scraping up skeletons

of phrases and exhausted expressions
with just the right amount of music,
like stuffing the wrong end of a flageolet
down your throat. I can show all beautiful
women that I am the crème de la crème,

a suave auteur worthy of warring wordplay
with Cyrano de Bergerac, if he were
a real person (he was), and his nose
didn't get too much in the way (it wouldn't).
I can offer a beau geste to the mademoiselle,

but then I remember: by definition, such
a gesture means as little as cubic zirconia
in a plastic crown. She'd find this entire
tableau a joke; I'd embarrass myself
if I pressed on. So let me try this again,

this time, without the French - which, after all,
I never learned or took classes for. Once,
I laid eyes on a girl so beautiful, she stopped
my breath. Then she let it settle in her
palm, handed it to me, and said, "I believe

this belongs to you." And - while resisting
the urge to say she bid me adieu, or calling her
mon cher amour - I smiled, and she smiled,
And we didn't speak. And we didn't sing.
And we definitely didn't dance.