Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #29: Is Love Fleeting, Futile, or Just F'ed Up?

Competing views from the Pont Mirabeau, in Paris

Galway Kinnell wasn’t the only poet to look at The Pont Mirabeau, in Paris, and see more than a way across the river. Guillaume Appolinaire looked down into the murky waters of love/loss in a poem The Paris Review translated a few years back.

In 1912, he wrote:

Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. 

Hand in hand, standing face to face, 

Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make 

Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream, 

And our dream 

Of getting back our love of life again. 

Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.

The Pogues, whose band name suggests “kiss my ass” in Celtic, covered another translation of Appolinaire’s anti-love song, with an Anglo-Irish lilt and lament. So they weren’t that far from jumping into the dark waters of the Seine, either, rather than just singing about them.

Personally, I’ll stick with the urgently kissable mouth conjured by Kinnell, thank you very much. 

Either way the lament stings: That river flows and love ends. Or in my case, it do…