Bill Roberts, Poet

One-Man Band

Author: Bill Roberts

A light mist doesn’t dampen the concert

under a bridge by the Seine,

pausing en route to yet another art museum

on this snappy cold autum day.

He leads the band, plays all the instruments,

alternately and sometimes simultaneously,

familiar French tunes, with violin,

accordion, harmonica, trumpet, clarinet,

flute, tuba – yes, tuba too! – and piccolo,

time kept with a bass drum he hammers

with busy left foot.  Oh,

he sings softly when squeezing his

ornate squeezebox or

bowing his gleaming Stradivarius.

No one else stops for his concert,

beating us to the artwork.

I place a ten-Euro note in the maestro’s cap.

Using his entire mismatched orchestra,

he plays the American National Anthem

as we stride arm-in-arm into the cool mist.

This was in Paris in the fall of 2007, after a delightful lunch on a parked bateau on the Seine, an overcast and misty day.  Art all over the city, in every direction, from the over-regarded Mona Lisa at the never-enough-time-to-see-everything Louvre to honest-to-goodness dirty postcards along the river.  And one-man bands aren’t exactly novel either, but this guy was so good, so arresting, like the city itself, making us want to come back, again and again.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.