Joseph Cornell, The Hotel Eden, 1945
(assemblage with music box).
Rowing in Eden, by Eric Anderson Reece
The hands had flown off the clock at the Hotel Eden
and above its blank face
a small wooden door opened in silence
to announce the eternal now
The concierge introduced himself as Pascal
“The Pascal” we asked
He shrugged and said “Here at the Hotel Eden
you are what you were before the the“
He rang for the bellhop whose pillbox cap read Apollinaire
“The Apollinaire” (we couldn’t help asking)
He blew a soap bubble out the bell of his tiny clay pipe
and said “Every poem is the world in miniature”
Then he showed us to our room on the eighth floor
right between lilas and pensee
Outside the window a troupe of angels
was dancing Swan Lake atop a single obelisk
Below the belfry a cockatoo still held in its beak
the chord that once woke monks to their vespers
Apollinaire suspected the bird was an invention
of the well-dressed American poet
who sat each day in the French garden
writing obscure madrigals on paper wings
“He says we are all fictions
but that he believes in us anyway”
The day stretches out infinitely
At the Hotel Eden where the hour is always the same
even your mind can only imagine the present
“It is a great relief” I admitted
Apollinaire smiled around the stem of his pipe
and said “It pleases the Chinese poets especially”
From the balcony I gazed out across the blue gulf
A woman in a tiny white boat rowed alone
with the clock’s missing hands
“She never stays long” explained Apollinaire
“I’ve heard she prefers the Hotel de l’Etoile
on the other side of the horizon
where even the starfish (those masters
of every element) dive down from the sky
to hear Orpheus tear his throat each night
with the song of his eternal longing”
In Jonathan Safran Foer (ed.), A Convergence of Birds. Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell.
