Fani Papageorgiou

The Man in Chamonix

It is a long time after dinner in our hotel

My father and his friends are in the billiard room, playing pool

My brother is learning

There are more children playing board games in the lounge

I have just finished scanning the bookshelves in the next room and I am staring out of the window at the snow burdening the trees in the blue moonlight, the thatched roofs, wondering if this is a place where people don’t lock their doors at night.

Why, are roofs always like that in the Alps?

But why, for the snow to drip easily once it melts, according to my book Houses of the World

I have been standing in a nook designed to catch the sun

But it is dark and a man comes over and talks to me

I reply politely in what I hope is correct French

I don’t know how old he is but I’ve never talked to an adult who is not a teacher, a doctor or a friend of my parents

He asks me how old I am and where I am from

He looks like a man who keeps his own counsel.

He asks if I like skiing, why I am standing all alone

And my head is starting to leak.

Almost everything happens in language

He wonders if I would like to join him for a walk

Life is accident and organic matter my father always said

And then suddenly there is an ache under my breastbone

And I feel something is ending right that minute.

This is the hurt which drives everyone mad in books and although I don’t feel it yet

I am being in the know

Life will be tenuous and always in faded pale blue—the color of ice.

Write down what you love.

I say goodnight in terror and run back to the other room

my father is putting an arm around my shoulders

his other hand gripping the billiard cue

and the pockets at the corners of the table

become a piece of the ocean

and there is glassware in my chest.

The air is full of tobacco and cognac

the room goes away and the room comes back.

My brother is keeping a keen eye on the white cue ball

He is determined to master the game

Everybody has a plan but if you want one thing too much, sometimes you end up with the opposite.

With nothing decided yet

With the love that I have got still in me

And because I am twelve, I know nothing of

The terrible isolation of the head, of

The burden of many waters.

Goodbye my love, someone will write on my chemistry book and I will read it before I go to bed and it will go straight on my solar plexus and stay there

Click … click

You give away your power too easily, someone will say under a corrugated pink sky, on a tiny island off the West Coast of Scotland and I will have nowhere to go

Click … click

I must not see you again under the circumstances, someone will say looking at the carpet and I will start bleeding into my own brain

Click … click

Come here, you

someone will say at a party

You and I robbed a bank together in another life

and like the growth rings on a tree, my adult life will begin without me knowing it and it will proceed in circles, from within outwards

But first I will have to find a voice.

Fani Papageorgiou was born in Athens in 1975. Her first book of poems, When You Said No, Did You Mean Never?, is forthcoming in 2013.