Spoken Word writes on his wonderful Spoken Verse.com: . Ezra Pound shared a cottage with W B Yeats during a period of three years. It seems that he didn’t share Yeats’ ambition to end up living alone on an island in the middle of a lake.
The title refers to Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree. McHugh and I drove out there from Sligo, but your man who lived in the cottage on this shore didn’t feel like rowing us out.
“Volailles” actually means “chickens,” if we ]take it literally, but here it means whores. “Poules” is similar and it also means both chickens and whores. There was a delightful film called Irma la Douce with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon set in the seedy part of Paris populated mainly with the Poules, their Mecs and the Flics – meaning the Prostitutes, their Pimps and the Cops. And, if you haven’t seen Irma La Douce here it is – just watch the opening few minutes and you’ll be hooked–er, yes, “hooked” is appropriate:.
The first tobacconist is in ‘Little Britain’ : Government Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
The second tobacco shop is in Old Town. San Diego, California, USA.
¶
O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish and the shag,
And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the volailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.
¶
