RUE ST. PAUL

RUE ST. PAUL

RUE ST. PAUL

I see them standing in the small room, the one I rented 
for them on rue St Paul – Hôtel du Septième Art. 
A couple from Ireland, in their fifties, in a hotel 


on a street crammed with shabby-chic antique shops. 
Do they look out of place ? They had lived in London, 
and in a provincial city, but their blood 


was of the rural parishes of county Cork.
I’m older now than they were then. 
In their unfashionable clothes and poor hair-cuts


they stand by the bed and marvel at the framed 
black-and-white posters on the walls – Bogie, Bacall, 
James Dean – as I outline my plans to shuttle them 


between the Sacré Coeur and the Eiffel Tower, taking in 
a bateau-mouche trip on the Seine, and they give 
themselves up, willingly, to my banal tourism. 


But my mother, menopausal, got up each morning at dawn 
to walk the quartier in search of its wild cats. Maybe she met
the ghosts of the animals from the zoo put there by a king.


And my father scrutinised the French racing pages,
trying to figure out the PMU betting system. He might
have got on well  with the Portuguese migrants 


who lived on the street in the fifties, when TB was rampant.
I stand there looking up at the boarded windows 
of the cheap hotel, its fake Hollywood nostalgia 


so at odds with the street’s seventeenth-century houses
where the spectres of monks and merchants shuffle 
between the roof beams. I see my parents


standing by the bed in the small room, desperate to 
show me they understood what all the fuss was about.
I hope I was kind to them, but I doubt it.