French Sentence, and: Early Gothic

Abstract

French Sentence, and: Early Gothic Esther Lin (bio) French Sentence for Marcelo and Janine My teacher tells me, madamewe cannot write that you wept in publicmore than once. This is not a French sentence.Instead let us write that you were movedto action. For revolutionaries smashedthe stone face of the Virginwith the stone face of Saint Denis— the Virgin a lover, finally! On streets, I place my handinside pocksshot into limestone walls. In bookshops, lithographs burn palaces, carriages,and children. The check-in girl refusesmy identification card. Okay. This year I've enoughnods and stamps that thisdoes not hurt me. For I have left America.I have left America! [End Page 153] Early Gothic I traveled to be alone, out of Paris,where I knew no one, to Rouen, whereI knew Emma Bovary and the lame boyher husband destroyed. They wereenough. The city of a thousand bells,my hostess called it, and along the riverI visited many, irreligiousbut for the religion of beauty. I feltalone. On the third day a young manfrom Freiburg met me at the Cathedral.Handsome, he didn't know howto stand for a photo, patient he waswith a green traveler and her queries."What annoys the French more,that I look Chinese or soundAmerican?" "Certainly American,"he said plainly. The largest churchwe'd viewed yet, we traveled hundredsof meters apart, the narthex stockedwith radiant figures brought indoors:Moses, Saint James, John the Baptist,men from my childhood. Howbattered their beards, rumpled theirrobes, by many-thousand rainfalls,gusts, roving hands of the pilgrim.They seemed to me as aged as my father,when his skin filled with light, he was thatfeeble in the days before he passed.By choosing the West, he'd ensuredthat these prophets were as much myancestors as his own grandfather,the man who cradled him and taughtto him the lessons of laughter and change. [End Page 154] Esther Lin Esther Lin is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and of the chapbook The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018). Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2022 and 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which raises consciousness about the structural barriers facing undocumented poets. Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College