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{liberties with my empress} luke irwin One kind of oblivion is ice cream; You can have some. You can sit and eating on the steps of the Tuileries. A champ will stroll by touting his streamers; his girl sways like a walking coronet, cornets sounding off street bands burning fireworks: green copper, gunpowder rights of citizenship. Awards, medals, ribbons, little spoon samples of gelato in pink, paper imitation goblets, our best, bourgeois accolades. Or you can ask for shaved ice, lemon sherbet or orange sherbet among the great ones full of glory in their Christian bodies. You can believe in Josephine, a real two-hats-a-day girl and nary a repeat in her Christian life; always ice creams on time and how fun to sit, doing nothing, slurping, watching the festival: Spectacular signifiers and the gunpowder scent just starting to singe your nose, as pleasant a sensation as to imagine being nothing, knowing nothing, feeling nothing harsh like the firework smoke billowing out, or the Lord God smashing your barricade to talk with you in your untended garden… All that from those champs on this day. |
