My next door neighbors from 1971 to 1980 in Northampton were
the Bagg family – Bob Bagg, a UMass English Professor, Sally Bagg, a cellist
[in whose parents’ home they then lived], and five children, Teddy, Chris,
Jonathan, Melissa, and Hazard. Hazzie
was a bit older than my older son, Patrick.
Bob is a poet – one of the “Amherst poets” in the line that began with Robert
Frost and continued through Richard Wilbur [with whose beautiful wife I danced
in the American Academy in Rome on New Year’s Eve 1954, when I had just turned
twenty-one and she was amusing herself by vamping me.] Jonathan is now the violist of the Ciompi
Quartet, which is in residence at Duke University, where Susie and I have heard
him several times.
One of Bob’s poems concerns a meeting with a woman, in which
there appears the line “J’arrive, J’arrive.”
I think the meeting takes place on the Riviera, but it is forty years
and more since I have read the poem. Anyway,
I always think that is what I should say when I get to Paris, so:
J’arrive, J’arrive!
PLAYING THE WHEEL
ReplyDeleteBy Robert Bagg
We are leaving the Casino at Juan-les-Pins
the roulette marbles still tumbling over numbers
about to lodge in somebody else's stomach.
By a hotel full of the Rolling Stones
arrogantly parked is a black Maserati,
the mild swale of its transparent fastback
frosted smooth by the August dawn.
There a suave finger––speaking, I supposed,
for the whole woman––had written,
"Dear Luc, I waited for you since three hours.
Your anger not incurable anger?
Biot 479 310"
My fingers are spinning the dial
around like the wheel of fortunate numbers
ticking into a perfect parlay
just as she answers—Daisy! with a voice
full of money which I spend in the dream
Je suis Luc J'arrive J'arrive
[The picture on Bagg's web page, http://www.robertbagg.com/bio.htm is taken in front of the gate of the American Academy in Rome, up on top of the Janiculum.]