Vichyssoise

“Forget grammar and think about potatoes.”—Gertrude Stein

“History is the pack of lies agreed upon,”

Napoleon said—or was it old Fontanelle,

Who in his nineties flirted with fair Minette?

(“Ah, Madame, if only I were eighty again!”)*

Finding myself tangled in despair’s sticky web,

a labyrinth whose gaping entrance is a snare

set in its place by intellectual disdain,

I fled the asserted for fancy’s foolish bet,

which in a torrid hour ghosts deem “reality”—

things being what perpends, no mind their human fame.

Dissing Bump City’s claim to be a real place

“There’s no there there!” Gertrude declared to gay hurrahs.†

 “A rose is a rose is a rose.” That would explain

the mess of potage served by her as Vichyssoise.

Pablo Picasso, Leeks, Fish Head, Skull, and Pitcher (1945)

* The nonagenarian Enlightenment poet and philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) on his being introduced to the beautiful salonnière Anne-Catherine Helvétius.

† Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), on Oakland, California, where she had been brought up. For this and the epigraph, see, e.g., Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).

May 2, 2025