Le Petit Trottin

This morning, while I am waiting to see Dr. Feight, I find among his magazines an expensive-magazine-sized and -shaped book of Toulouse-Lautrec plates. It doesn’t include Le petit trottin, an illustration Toulouse-Lautrec made for the cover of some sheet music, and the subject of a long-ago poem by my friend Rick Dietrich, who, like every poet since Keats, has written a wan version of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

To listen to Rick read the poem, click here.

Le Petit Trottin

Tonight, I am the wicked gentleman
disappearing from Toulouse-Lautrec’s cover
for his cousin’s song: the crumpled top hat,
the cane over his shoulder, the down-turned moustaches
and drooping jowls, the dotted green ascot
and green checked trousers—one thick leg vanishing
into the space that marks the cover’s edge,
but one leg left behind solidly planted,
and one eye left behind, leering from behind
its monocle, glued to Le Petit Trottin—
the name of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cousin’s song,
“The Little Errand Girl”—though she is not
so little, the leering gentleman observes,
her blond hair upswept over sensual ear,
her pink mouth, the lilac ribbon around
her pretty throat.
                                 “What do you have in your
basket, ma chère?” he is—without thinking—
for ever thinking, while she keeps him
there, fixed in the corner of her eye,
till the other thick leg can take the next step,
and he can disappear for good.