The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

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In Paris

I wanted to tell you that in the gallery looping the obscene pyramidal wound of the Louvre there is a café where once I took refuge from either the sun or the rain—both extremes a kind of musculature, an oppression when the season is not right—and where my mother and I fed sparrows the fine‑crumbed bread from our table. They seemed to know us, our discomfort, how the silence that followed each start displaced the easy morning like a drop of water in oil. They were unblinking, heads cocked and waiting for a tale. I read once that birds tilt their heads to orient themselves within the architecture of sound. Perhaps this has been my problem all along; no ready answer to the question of impetus, of plot. All morning we had wandered unpredictable streets, and in the Tuileries I collapsed against a painted carousel horse and finally smiled. I wanted to tell you that I ached, just ached for it to be about this: the picture my mother later taped to the fridge of me there, my circular laughter and amaranth dress—or the late sky over the river, or the light shattering itself around the watery spire of Notre Dame. Paris will always be about my mother and me, though she will rewrite this story over and over. Your art is your art, she will say. It is whatever you need it be. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t understand then what stories hold, or what they foreclose. The tale is hunger at the Louvre or streetlamps casting erratic shadows or my mother crying that I don’t know how to love. Above the table in the gallery café, a flag sighs in fitful declination. It shakes off story after story. The story is never enough.

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