Katy Didden

Parc Georges-Brassens, Paris Most afternoons, I’d run laps through Parc Brassens where grows the second smallest vineyard I have ever seen, and where those silver, pruned-back stalks looked blunt, strung-out on wires, and mostly dead all winter. That was how I saw them. That’s all I expected. Even in the cold, I’d see a guy my age there, once a week, playing his guitar. He’d sit next to the bench where I’d be stretching. He rarely spoke— just to ask if I’d like a song— until the week before I left for good. I was sitting at the top of a hill about a hundred feet away from where if you stand tiptoe you can see the Eiffel Tower. He sat too close to me. We spoke of many things. Then he suggested we go at it right there, on the ground, under the sun. This is how one lives who knows that she will die: rolling in the arms of anyone when she can— rolling in the arms of a musician—aware that no one cares much what we do in little knolls behind reedy forsythia, in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of living. And I would know now how he felt, and the ground against me, and whether he was rough or sweet. And what is possible would widen every hour. Oh, but me, I thought I was immortal.

Who wielded the chisel at the left portal, south porch, the scene of Theo chained, naked to the waist, leaning in to the brutal hand of what looks to be an even younger boy? What man carved stone to mimic flesh as it would look inside the torture of its flensing? How he must have held the scene in his own mind, thought it back to the act itself, modeling the lines with his own limbs so he would know both how a body bends in pain, and how a hand extends the flayer’s rake.