Second-Hand Proust
"I feel the poison of the situation seeping through",
you once wrote. Another time you wrote
"Keep running from your thoughts."
When I did go home, you missed me.
You're like my second-hand Proust-
Hundreds of pages of melancholy and self-loathing
seeping between two dusty covers.
I wonder which character I am; would I be Celeste Albaret,
"softer and more languishing than her sister",
or Albertine, "incapable of making anything up
except to give pleasure".
I can see myself as Comtesse D'Arpajon, drenched
Felliniesque in the Hubert Robert fountain,
the kind of absurd calamity that would only happen
to one with a poison heart, surely. If you ever
write a remembrance of things past, just say you saw me
once, languishing in violet among the nobility,
as if making the rounds at these sort of affairs were a tiresome duty.
Then, I vanished.
