france’s august traffic jam.

Julio Cortazar is a public servant,
an Argentine, playful, lanky.
In Paris, he imagines a capital,
stranded in the steel sea of time
marked by tires, the smell of gasoline.

At 3 a.m., Saturday is black all day
and night. Thanks to obscure religions,
the drive from Toulouse to Paris
was Hobbesian. A toll plaza evaporated.
The blacktop was shark-like.
Steel cages, containing wailing children,
were broken into lines that led nowhere.

The French commute with giant maps
slightly larger than Los Angeles
County. Sometimes the corpses
of dozens of elderly Parisians
complain that worsening highways gave rise
to a robust culture and excellent antidepressants.

The state is not at fault.

The traffic jam finally breaks up.
The engineer feels masochistic.
His lost community, the camaraderie
of cars, the Renault Dauphine
who is pregnant with his child.

And they were rushing at 50 miles an hour
toward the lights that grew bit by bit,
without really knowing anymore
the reason for so much haste,
the reason for this race in the night
among unknown cars where no one knew
anything about the others,
where everyone looked steadily
forward, exclusively forward.

—

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-traffic6-2008aug06,0,2299472,full.story

~ by author on August 6, 2008.