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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4014 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention tunes to make a bear dance Nellie Melba (Lorin Ford) for Gustave Flaubert Each day he questioned the fruit with a fine scalpel, pared away the layers: rind of sophistication, pith of breeding, education and the taut manners of his class; peeled back the membrane til the thing quivered naked on his study table palpable and beating as a living heart. Through glass doors the white fog ghosted the civil inclination of his lawns toward the Seine. The years passed in his Paris apartments while he wrote a word, a sentence, then discarded and began again and again and again until it rang as well as the sound of melted drops of thaw falling on silk of a dove-grey umbrella, as clear to his ear as the Angelus bells that rang out time in the provincial village he was building brick by brick. There he grew his mind’s revealed bride, confining her to a winter garden and a narrow house with rising damp in the walls. There he charted her fevers. It was not the fashion. Scandalous waste of time and talent on an unfit subject. Who was this ridiculous romantic wife of a small-time country doctor to be rigged up in the name of literature? The writer, true witness and precise practitioner of the surgeon’s healing art, defending his book before the public bar, said “Madame Bovary – c’est moi.” |
