Biscuit Factory

 
Send my regards to the Paris streets, the poet wrote*
from exile in America. I will do the same to the room
on Alma, close to the Eiffel Tower,
where I stayed with Jeannie, from Alaska,
and her Turkish friend, Hanife.
One room, with a hotplate, for the three of us,
a toilet near the stair. While a man unlocked the door
and stood, laughing, admiring my panties,
his girlfriend emptied their furniture
into the foyer. The night of my 24th birthday,
the cards predicted disaster before I unfastened my handbag
in the restaurant, to pay. Someone had stolen my wallet
and passport in the metro; it was a long way back.
to our street since erased by an upgrade.
Hanife knew a phonebox where foreigners called
long distance for free. I lined up behind Moroccans and Turks,
and phoned my mother at work where a Kwakiutl sun
blazed on the wall behind her. At lunchtime
she went to the bank in her red high heels,
and sent me money. Why else am I here,
but to wander until I remember
the red brick Ormand Biscuit Factory
near where my father worked in Victoria?
Thick black fuel tanks sprang from the ground
where condos now simper. My father climbed
to the top of the silos on a winding steel ladder
to document gauges. We drove up in the Chevy,
to fetch him for dinner, my mother in a red-belted,
peter pan dress, and stockings. He gave us treats—
nickels, raisins, candies—; he emptied his pockets,
and then my brother and I climbed up the side of the vats
as high as we could before our parents finished their kiss,
and noticed us. You know, the condos there now,
where the oil tanks were,
and the biscuit factory turned into self-storage,
are nothing to what happened to the girls
I thought were my friends, and me.
We lined up at Dior in Paris with the models,
and went in. Our hair shone like glass, and we glittered, too,
all three of us, with our fine, invisible, unusable talents.

*George Seferis

Author photo credit to Xan Shian.