Your Father's Flowers
Sidney woke today, incubated
In the city’s washed-out park
By warming’s global spark,
His fading winter traded
For an unseasonable sun
When those passing fixtures,
Time and grief, succumb
To more far-sighted pictures,
Easter Sundays
Where each girl pegs
Her future on the eggs
Her father Fabergés:
Soil’s impossible bouquets
Risen to fluorescent glory,
The reappearing understory
Of inconceivable soufflés.
March 7th, 2006
Almhof Schneider, Lech
March 16th, 2006
Antibes
January 30th, 2008
Tippet Alley
Explanation
Hi Lize and Tia,
On your birthday, Lize, and on Easter, I thought I’d send you and Tia an Easter poem.
Mommy and I had just been in Paris, where we still had an apartment on the rue de Varenne (we were there for nine years), and had been walking in the Luxembourg gardens, where the spring flowers were bursting out of the ground.
It took some time for that to sink in, apparently, because I didn’t write the poem until we were in Lech, skiing with our friend Walter, the Chairman of Jägermeister, on Mommy’s birthday. (Mommy was Chairman of the liquor company back then.) We were staying at a wonderful inn where the same people visit for their whole lives each spring, and the wait staff all dress in dirndls, lederhosen, and loden jackets and sing Austrian folk songs during dinner, run by an elegant woman who also runs a hotel in Munich.
Apparently I worked some more on the poem the next week while we were visiting you in Juan-les-Pins just before your birthday in 2006. Tia, you were two and a half. Olivier was six months old. So the whole family was slowly added to the poem.
Sidney had died two months before, on January 6th of 2006, and we were thinking of him. Seeing the colorful flowers blooming out of the grey soil in the park seemed to us like Sidney was coming back to earth with the spring. Certainly his gifts were all around us, as they still are.
Sidney’s favorite restaurant in Paris was Le Soufflé, a cute small old-fashioned place where all dishes were served as very good soufflés, where Mommy and I used to go also. And of course, a soufflé rises like flowers out of the ground or like Christ on Easter. So resurrection was the understory: the small plants that grow up under larger bushes, and also the backstory, the hidden text of life, of our future.
The poem says that time and grief, our mourning for Sidney, are only passing fixtures in a larger, more life-affirming universe of regrowth and rebirth. It seems impossible that lilacs grow out of dead ground, but such is life.
The Easter eggs are jeweled Fabergé eggs, elegant and equally colorful.
Le Soufflé is still there, at 36 rue du Mont Thabor, near the Luxembourg.