Paris, Mon Amour

"when the Gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers" --line from the film "Out of Africa" She stopped, transfixed, a breathless butterfly pinned to a board, and she said, "That is So beautiful!" Then, turning to her husband as they stood in my kitchen before an aerial photograph of L'Ile de la Cite' shaped like a ship in the beating heart of Paris, (young Yuppie wife of entrepreneurial architect who owned half the houses on the street where I lived), she asked with pleading eyes, "Could we go someday?" Knowing the appetite for that which lies beyond Beyond: Paris, La Cite' Emeraude, or wherever is the personal Shangri La, I wished I could have shared what I've known: a second floor apartment in an historic building in the 12th--its circular staircase royally carpeted in red, enclosing a tiny lift, depositing us to a storied paradise, its rooms extending beyond glass doors of an antechamber into a formal salon, two stately bedrooms with balconies, and a "bureau," birthplace of poems, diaries of dreams, and in the interior courtyard beneath our common windows, open to the Paris bleu, a caged canary sang, lusting for open sky in mornings filled with the perfume of freshly baked pastries and baguettes from the patisserie below. Once, I was besotted with a man who told me after lovemaking, "I never knew how much yearning you needed." He divined this, and for a time he fed that soul hunger in me, so that it was hard when he left, and they always leave. Ships seeking harbor, leave in their wake a yearning in the corners of your life, which will surely bring back Paris and everyone you have ever loved, which will somehow, somehow, against all odds, satiate the supplicant heart.