Time on Water by Robert Gibbons
In Lieu of Ever Seeing Honfleur
Sunrise insinuates a purple cloud of recollection. A light that yesterday turned East Boston into Honfleur. Only this low, momentary angle in February can transform the windows of these wooden tenements, where rats are cold on backstairs, into a lovely French boat-building town. Boston's more modest. Baudelaire hated to leave Paris to return to his birthplace. Last night I dreamt of a barge docked along the quays of Honfleur. Our friends on board, I shouldn't have worried at all how to navigate in the open sea, what with Honfleur ideally situated on the shore of the Seine estuary, before one enters the English Channel.
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