The Man with the Beret

Biarritz. Hard to believe I’ve reached
this fabrication by the sea
where kings and empresses once held sway
and Picasso’s brushes
cut bathers into triangles.
        Sitting on a rock and watching
families, well-coiffed dogs, grand-dames
in white shorts and sandals, old couples
holding hands as they walk the quay,
I feel more invisible than air

more foreign than a phantom from the days
of Napoleon III who might at any moment
alight from the Rock of the Virgin.
I want to go home, as much as I first
wished to come here; begin to walk away
just as a man with a battered beret passes by,
as if part of an old cartoon.
Voila! I welcome the joy of cliches
that relieve by returning the familiar,
like a Picasso so often viewed

its angles now form another cartoon,
demanding no more effort than a ritual
performed over and over, reassuring
as rhymes, those predictable and
recollected sounds from earlier lines.
        I think about earlier times,
foreign as the landscapes
of memories,
as La Belle Époque
before the wars and fires.

--Biarritz, France

Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published nine books of poetry as well as fiction, essays, and poems in over 500 journals. She has won fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maryland Arts Council, among others.