"Someone in Paris, France Is Thinking of You," by Alex Dimitrov
Let's gather and take this poem step by step as we pause time and consider our love while in Paris, France.
Hello hello readers, welcome back and happy day. Is it sunny where you are? Does it smell like rain and mulching leaves? Is it a cloudy day from wherever you are reading?
I’m thinking of you, readers, from my laptop while I write this. I wonder if you read these letters on your phone, sitting at the desk of your office (whether that is somewhere far away or at your home). I wonder if you read these from the comfort of your bed in the evening after a long day and the last dregs of your thinking allow you to enjoy a poem. I wonder if you open this email, close it, and revisit it many hours, days, weeks later and remember: “Ah yes, I have a poem.” Do you see this email and smile remembering you signed up for it and close your phone and carry on? However this letter finds you, I am thinking of you.
This poem makes me chuckle a bit at this moment in time because of the rampant bed bug problem that is devastating Paris, France–it alters the romance of this poem, allowing for an unintended moment of humor. If you let it, the bed bugs can break the serenity of this scene.
Someone in Paris, France Is Thinking of You
by Alex Dimitrov
This poem is happening in Paris, France where it’s raining and we’re all so drunk that it’s impossible to keep a secret. Every morning the waiters say bonjour and every morning I drink my coffee with a kind of American sadness they’ve started saying hello. Hello, beautiful man I’ll never have on Rue Charlot. Hello, woman smoking by the Seine and closing her eyes between drags. We’re all lost, even in Paris, and if this place won’t take my mind off you I guess I’m in love and in for more rain. You are the man on Rue Charlot somewhere in Brooklyn, peeling an orange and thinking of buying a suit. I would like to be an orange in that suit. I would like all the men on Rue Charlots across the world to put in their resignations and stop torturing me. Let me chase fire on another street, in another country where someone takes out the orange and peels it. And puts it slowly to their mouth. There’s a pause. The woman closing her eyes opens them. The lights on the boulevards come on. Someone smiles. Someone sights. Someone lingers. Someone in Paris, France is thinking of you.
This poem by Alex Dimitrov is pure free verse–there is no apparent structure here, no rhyme scheme or form, just one long meandering thought. Everything is contained in this one poem, and everything in this poem is contained in one moment. Dimitrov places his narrator in Paris, France, but other than that, we know nothing about him. We know that he is drunk, that time is slowing for a moment, and he reflects on his life in Paris. He spills his secrets because they cannot be kept.
The waiters say bonjour but even in this new, exciting space, he has an aura of American sadness about him that causes the waiters to greet him with hello. I love this description–there is something so apt about an “American sadness” in a European environment. The descriptor of “American” is doing so much work–we are plagued by our work, by weighty social and environmental factors, by the lives we lead in a country that can be so difficult to live in.
It’s at this point that we learn the narrator is on Rue Charlot, a “chic” road full of restaurants and art (this is what Google tells me). The narrator watches the people on the street and repurposes the sad “hello” he receives from the waiter: “Hello, beautiful man” and “Hello, woman smoking.” It seems that this “hello” is full of love, a gentle admiration of life happening as the narrator watches. These people could be moving through the world with purpose, but the narrator instead suggests: “We’re all lost, even in Paris.”
It’s here that the poem wanders away from the Parisian street. The narrator is thinking of “you” and of all the overlapping Rue Charlots around the universe. There are people lost on different streets somewhere, smoking cigarettes or peeling oranges. The “you” the narrator addresses is in Brooklyn thinking of buying a suit. And in comes my favorite line:
“I would like to be an orange in that suit.”
I love the expression of romantic love here, of just wanting to be with someone, as near as you can be to them, in their pocket, waiting to be taken out, unwrapped, and devoured. The color orange shades the rest of this poem: chasing fires and orange peels. There is something bright and urgent and exciting about recognizing love in Paris, France.
As quickly as this train of thought begins, it’s over. There is a pause. Everything and everyone is set back in motion. The smoking woman opens her closed eyes. The lights flicker on. The soft sounds of a pedestrian street fill the narrator’s ears. The narrator ends with one last declaration of love, and an admission that he got lost in thought thinking of “you.” And Dimitrov closes the poem as it began in the title:
“Someone in Paris, France is thinking of you.”
In the end, I am also left thinking. I’m thinking of a warm chai in my hand and blowing the wisps of steam coming from my mug. I’m thinking of my bed when my apartment is chilly and how nice it is to be held under the sheets. I’m thinking of you, reader, sitting wherever you are, reading this post, and how I wish I could see you and talk and gather in person around a shared poem.
If you enjoyed this poem… you can read more of Alex Dimitrov’s poems here or check out his craft Substack here.
If you want some autumnal poems… check out The Poetry Foundation’s curated list of fall poems.
If you want to try writing poetry… what are you thinking about right now? Describe the space you are in and then move the poem to your thoughts and then back to describing the space.