Ezra

All Saint's Day, one of the best days in Paris (when the weather's good, anyhow)...and I was missing the place a little this morning. So I took myself for a gorgeous walk through the Annex to find a cafe run by a guy named Ezra Braves. I'd run into him at dinner a little while ago, and found out that he makes croissants--real croissants--at 6 am every morning in his Toronto cafe on Dupont Street. Sounded too good to be true, but when I walked in--somewhat after 6am, i admit--there was Braves, with fresh croissants on the counter.
He opened the cafe not even a year ago, called the place Ezra's Pound, and included various scales & coffee-weighing contraptions in the decor, to round out the "pound" pun. And--most appropriately--the cafe is near a subway stop, to commemorate Pound's best-known poem (see below).
It's only a two-line poem, which apparently started out being more than a page long. Good lesson in editing. I spent a lovely half-hour drinking marvellous coffee--better than the coffee you get in most cafes in Paris, gotta say--and I decided to take a quick look at Pound's bio (to find the exact punctuation for the poem below). Discovered, strange serendipity, that today is actually the anniversary of Pound's death, in Venice, at age 87.

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra's Pound [238 Dupont Street, just east of Spadina, open Tues-Sat]