The Ancient Noise of D'Etre

~ Susanna Childress Alexandre et Theodore sont beaux et intelligents. Janine est plus jolie que Monique. Monique est plus jolie que Bernadette. Bernadette est plus jolie que Amandine. —“Learning to Compare,” Beginner’s French It’s this. Not the silence at dusk, plumes of an anhinga stretched to dry, and a gator’s eggs, of which perhaps two in a batch of sixty will make it, buried in a nest of river grass. When has anything so pert as comparison messed with the copious world, its mangled precedence, its closing vein: my book has no section on learning to survive. For that, I’ll enunciate Je ne vois aucun taxi though it might come out C’est un bel arbre. Somebody’s already sung that one and I’m thinking alligator eggs—how temperatures engender— though the parking lot song makes sense: on this river, men played banjo, harmonica, kazoo, they sang of salamanders, egrets, blue mullet they could or could not catch. So why is Janine prettier than Monique, Monique prettier than Bernadette, Bernadette than Amandine. There sit Alexander and Theodore, beautiful and intelligent, the bastards. To a gator, everything is a predator the first three years of its life, even its father, and what has a mother to do but hiss and smack her tail around even if the babes are not in need of warmth, not like me, on the porch, this Beginner’s French lit up with colors, fonts, superlatives. After the first three years, it’s the alligator’s turn to be predator. Works just so, the ancient noise of d’etre, like the striated, hollow bottom of the bald cypress: widgeons wade there, far beneath the osprey. Here there’s such a thing, but no use for, any kind of comparison: none more lovely, none more inane—just alive, just not.