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Ghost Volcano
by
Sandra M. Gilbert

Roller Bladers in Paris


Unearthly lightness air and speed
of the passionate roleurs beside the Seine,

always on the qui vive along the quais,
as if fleeing into a streak of paint

to be slashed across crude blanks of the material
world by some post modern Caillebotte,

or better still as if right here, right now
might come the magic liftoff

moment when a dozen jeunes
jetting past slow-stepping grandmother

Seine in her shawl of mud
might rise—strange space craft!—

into the unimaginable avenir
that's coming soon like a full eclipse

above the downward stones of Notre Dame.
But what of the onetime soaring arches,

the aching theological erections?
Well, what of them?

There's no god but speed, hum the tiny
efficient wheels, the hovering blades,

no god but the body that flashes away
and away from its own dead weight,

the glisten of flesh
that rockets past itself

in the mad glad
minute surpassing gravity.

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SANDRA M. GILBERT'S most recent collection of poems is Ghost Volcano (Norton), which won the Paterson Prize for 1995.  Other recent publications include (click title) Wrongful Death: A Memoir (Norton) and, with Susan Gubar, Masterpiece Theater: An Academic Melodrama and the second edition of (click title) The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.  She teaches at the University of California, Davis.

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