Quadrille 60

~ qbit

I sing you “Alouette”
je te plumerai les yeux, bec, tête
plucked eyes, beak, head
happily stripped to gooseflesh
killing you with my beautiful French
our feathers like songs
we don’t understand
itching under our skin once we’re
hungry enough for love

 

For dVerse Quadrille

37 thoughts on “Quadrille 60”

  6. q, my meme used to sing this song! It was the first song she taught me to play on her keyboard though I never knew how to spell the words. Quiet separately from that memory this is a spicy poem. Whew.

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    1. Thank you! That’s a cool story. I always liked singing it even though nobody really thinks about the meaning of the words. Which is still very true in a lot of different ways.

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        1. No, not scandalous at all. And if you are a early 20th century French Canadian you think plucking and eating a skylark is pretty normal stuff, something to sing a chipper song about.

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          1. Ha! The Woonsocket French Canadian slang is its own dialect. I’ll have to look up plucking and skylark. We ate ‘patux’ and all the old ladies would go do da stores for da grocereee. !

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  11. So good – another one of those ‘don’t look too closely at the familiar child’s fairy-tale (or song in this case,) lest you find murder, mayhem, sex and other nasty beakery. Liked the irony of – ‘our feathers like songs / we don’t understand…’

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  12. You’ve just destroyed that song for me. I had somehow constructed it as being about writing…plumerai meaning “I will pen..”. Much nicer that way.

    Anyhow, the poem, yes, yes, yes, particularly like the feathers like songs we don’t understand, and that plucking away of coverings, getting right down to the skin of it all. Nice write.

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  15. That simile in the second half leaves me musing and plucking at my brain, but the hungry enough for love in the end is the best part – a sort of strange mating dance image. Most unique!

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  16. Cosmopolitan & sensual, this is a sine use of the quadrille, rocking the prompt. Fine lusty use of itch, I must say. “hungry for Love” sounds like an ELVIS SONG.

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  17. Certainly an unusual and clever quadrille. I always thought that song was odd. 🙂
    I particularly like these lines:
    “killing you with my beautiful French
    our feathers like songs
    we don’t understand”

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  19. Love is a kind of death that leads to life, Le petite mort and all that… eating is also an intimate act in which we take some other life into our bodies and it turns into our thoughts our loves and poems. Let me be clear, I am not saying it is cool to go all Silence of the Lambs (a movie that I hate more every time I have seen it), but we do tell our lovers colloquially that we can just eat them up. In reality, we are all in the same soup together, we might as well be tasty if we can.

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  21. Ha! Imagine my vegetarian surprise when my French got good enough to realize what I had been singing all those years! I like how you pull this feeling of discomfort through the rest of your poem, the itch, the hunger, and the happy brutality. It all combines in this weird delicious soup.

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