Best Ladies’ Room on U. S. 50
by Lee Harlin Bahan
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Versailles (verSAYLZ), town, SE IN, W of Cincinnati, OH Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I’m sitting on a toilet in Versailles, amazed a public restroom can be clean. Most service station johns aren’t mopped and leak so dirty water soaks your tennis shoes but keep—with blow-by-blow accounts of who- does-what-how-often scribbled on the walls— your mind off wet feet. These could be the walls a nun lives in. Suppose the name Versailles were said correctly—not by locals who insist the other word that means "to clean" is warsh—I’d be in France when wooden shoes chafed novices toward sainthood, pouring leek soup in an earthen bowl, checking for leaks that might stain Reverend Mother’s habit. Walls marbleized with gilt recede as I shoo flies—aswarm in summer at Versailles — off simple food I carry, must keep clean until it reaches Reverend Mother who is here by God’s command to save the Queen who otherwise will land in Hell. Rose-smell leaks from the royal chamber where, unclean beneath the silk she’s sewed in, mirrored walls repeating her, the mistress of Versailles sits eating chocolates and cashews. I blush, embarrassed by my clunking shoes and try to be like Reverend Mother who sips soup, untempted to try on for size those jeweled slippers that pieds angéliques would fear to tread in. "Jericho’s proud walls collapsed," the R. M. warns while wiping clean her lips, "as these will if you do not cleanse this palace of its decadence. Eschew, my daughter, worldly goods lest Mammon wall you off from Heaven." In reply, the Queen, whose skin is milk, chokes back a chuckle leaking from her throat. "Our soul is not for sale, our conscience, clean. The King hates golden shoes. He leaked on his once, charmed by La Joconde who watched, smiling from the wall here at Versailles." (first appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of Cincinnati Poetry Review) |
 Patricia Wallace Jones |
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