Paris, Panting

ISSUE: Spring 2009

A curious debut, & one of infinite interest, is that of
Mr. Bridge-Tower, young Negro from the Colonies . . .
—Le Mercure de France, 1789

At nine years, the youth astonishes
for his maturity of playing.
We at Le Mercure celebrate his arrival
to the Parisian concert stage.

They say leap-year babies
are out-of-time, moony. I’m really
just two, closer to the womb
than this world.

He was presented by his father, the Moor
Friedrich Augustus, to whom much praise is due.

Praise me. I am small. This hall looms
nearly as large and dark as he.

Rita Dove

Rita Dove is a former US Poet Laureate (1993–1995) and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon, 1986). Her most recent poetry collections are Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021), Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (Norton, 2016), Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009), and American Smooth (Norton, 2004). Dove is sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). Her honors include the 2011 National Medal of Arts. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.