La Cité des Enfants Perdus

(Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995)

It sounds better in French—a language you don’t speak and one
           I barely understand, squinting to keep track of the subtitles in 
our fifth-floor walk-up on Amsterdam and 106th, where, as the tape
           shifts from supply to take up reel, you predict one day you’ll give birth

to a son the spit of the strongman’s little brother-cum-sidekick, 
           around whom so much of this story spins. A city of lost children.
A scientist who means to make off with their dreams. A carnival 
           where the crusher of bones will try, once more, to shatter steel.

It’s the scene where a giant flea lowers its high-viz proboscis
           into the scalp of a conjoined twin, or the scene where the frogman, 
in his brass and copper finery, wanders forlorn on the bottom
           of a green sea—two moments I carry with me as I wax the legs

of our bed with Vaseline to keep at bay the Cimex lectularius
           (it sounds better in Latin). They congregate in the cracks where 
the floorboards are coming up like track in this railroad we rent
           for a pittance. Once more we try to sleep, perchance to dream,

but it’s impossible, as it is for that quack who straps the snatched boy
           into the sarcophagus and makes to wander through his subconscious.
The snow falls on the snowman. The toy soldier crashes his cymbals, 
           and suddenly the room is full of Santa Clauses. “Alleluia, Alleluia”

the man who waves his Bible up and down the avenue all hours
           begins to sing. “Jesus, he lives,” and we wake to a fresh set of welts 
where the bedbugs have whispered their Je t’aime. It’s February.
           We drag our books in refuse sacks up to the tar beach roof to freeze,

and when we leave, we jettison our furniture, but your prophecy
           I carry with me until the night years later when I bring round 
the car, one thing having led to another, as in that sequence that
           begins with a shed tear and ends with a cargo ship splitting the pier.

In between, a gull shits on the windshield of a Model T that upends 
           the fire hydrant that gives rise to the flood on which three rats,
on a tea tray, careen downstream. Cause and effect beginning 
           with the infinitesimal, if in Beijing a monarch flaps its wings

is not what I’m thinking, because I’m not thinking as I forget 
           the lights and you ride shotgun, swearing this isn’t it, as if
our little cosmonaut were not strapped into his ship and soon
           to join us in our ’93 Camry. It’s Easter Sunday. “Jesus, he lives,”

our old neighbor sings in his ecstasy, swinging his leather-bound.
           At Saint Luke’s, you waddle weighed down toward the maternity wing, 
where round noon our Yuri Gagarin will enter this atmosphere,
           gasping for oxygen. I’ll love the way he mixes up his P’s and K’s,

how he yells “ball,” pointing at a full moon. I’ll love him in our new
           sitting room, dancing loose-limbed to the Strokes. As the song goes, 
it’s hard to explain. A boy burps into the camera and, seven years
           before he’s born, you see our son. Krank’s laboratory is blown sky

high in an explosion of conical flasks and gas syringes from which
           Miette and One get the kids out just in time. In a car so old it’s become 
a joke in The Onion, we take him home, this boy we’ll raise to go
           in fear of the Cyclops and the Octopus with its manifold arms.

Read more from Issue 21.1.