Dalí’s lectures expounding his inexplicable “paranoiac-critical” method 
always drew crowds. For a lecture at the Sorbonne, he arrived in a white 
Rolls-Royce that was filled to the brim with cauliflower. . . .

—James R. Mellow,
New York Times Book Review

There is not enough white in the world, only
the Alps, blank canvases and sheets of paper,
melting eyeballs and watch faces, nightgowns
and bed sheets. So little white in Paris, just crème fraîche 
and candles, pale French faces, the infrequent snows
I dance through, making a random pattern of dark smudges 
in the courtyard of the Louvre, and the cold
white northern light that floods the bowl
the layered city lies in. Everyone knows
there are not enough gardenias or white camellias, 
that the world is longing for armloads of lilies
and white roses. But there is I, dressed all in white— 
my linen suit with the brocade vest, a starched
shirt and cravat, patent leather shoes and spats—
shining a stellar light on my frightening black eyes
and hair and mustache. A prince of art, I take my place
in the back of the splendid white machine, which Raffaello 
then fills with innumerable rough hard clouds
of the white cauliflower, which give off a small
stink of cabbage and the rich manure of the market gardens 
outside Paris, so many tight white heads of stopped, 
incipient bloom jostling against me as angel drives me 
through the cracked, encrusted streets, past buildings black 
with coal dust, effortlessly and without sound
gliding through the narrow medieval byways, over
the buried limestone quarries and lost streams,
down the melancholy rue des Ecoles to the gray building 
where the public waits, where I, the artist,
will descend in a blinding avalanche of vegetables, 
delivering a vision.