They’re party-crashing here
Underneath that gargoyle.
A hollyhock’s a weed
Good for a kitchen plot,
Guardian of small road
Or vacant, thistled lot,
Somehow someone allows
To prosper in this spot
Underneath a gargoyle
Who’s just a water spout.
Exotic Perfume
after Baudelaire
When, with eyes closed on some warm autumn night,
I catch a whiff of your hospitable breast,
I see happier shores go bounding past
Dazzled by the sun’s monotonous light;
A leisurely place to which Nature brings
Exotic trees, fruit oozing with flavour,
Men whose lean bodies are full of vigour,
Women whose frank looks are surprising.
Led by your scent towards that blessed isle,
I find harbours bristling with masts and sails
Still tossed by the wind and the waves’ rough swell,
And the tamarind perfume that all day long
Hangs in the air, stinging my nostrils,
Blends in my soul with the sailors’ song.
Off Frenchman’s Road
A surf of white poppies I think I saw once –
Fibrous stems flaunting downy buds
(Jiggling scrotums of secret flounce),
With petals pleated, puckered, crumpled, crushed,
The stamens’ daunting jubilant yellow
Wooing the pistil’s seed-jammed case.
A froth of white poppies, occupying the place!
I grabbed a bunch to stuff in a glass,
Put it where the light would shine through them
Conflating their shadow
With my spoons and pots – till tomorrow
Dusted my kitchen’s milky laminate
With day-glo pollen and the flotsam
Of linen-white petals shed in the night.
Aubade for a House Exchange, Summer 2003
Feeling right at home here in Palo Alto
Under the roses that trellis your patio,
Anti-war posters on Eric’s van
Squatting the drive like a jaded Buddha.
Through your good-neighbour fence I spy Jan
Hanging out wash, white & straight as America’s teeth.
God Bless Towels and Sheets!
Sexy, the fuchsia that jiggles its hips
At the backyard’s maidenhair ferns. No squirrels yet…
We’re still on Paris time –
Jet lag is why we’re up at this ungodly hour,
As my mother would say. Summers she skipped church.
Family custom she swore that Sunday (morning, her time)
I called and caught her
In the garden, glorifying roses.
Moon with a Supermarket Trolley
From my Juliet balcony
Overlooking a creek whose bed
Has been trash-filled for months,
Moon, I see you preening like a supermodel –
Nothing to do with me, or any
Of those other heavenly bodies
So difficult to discern
Through the excess of human light –
But what on earth is that supermarket trolley
Abandoned in the thatch
On your parched banks?
Listen! Even the crickets tsk-tsk.
Herbarium
A walled garden with a low door
Up to the café-cum-grocery-
P.O. and church,
Down to the brook and cemetery;
In the middle a mulberry tree
Offers shade from the summer heat,
A clothesline moored
To its scarred grey trunk. And a white
Table rusting in the gravel,
With three slatted
Chairs, two of them broken, all
Needing paint. Everything is old
And serviceable; that sheet drying
On the line was stitched together
From two of a great aunt’s ones, worn
Thin in the centre.
Take that says the hunter’s shotgun
From vineyards ripe for harvesting.
Buzz of a chainsaw –
Someone else repairing something.
Life
Going on 97 now. Or is it 98?
Most of your moving parts have seized up
Like that Beetle we let rust in the drive –
Glad when they towed it away.
Six o’clock. Suppertime. The girl brings a tray.
Here is a table, here is a chair, here
Is a soup spoon we lay in your hand,
Watch you try to find your mouth. This is life?
Well, as you said last week
After your winning streak at dominoes,
Perhaps The Good Lord is punishing you
For your attempted escape, two, three years ago
(Why are we so vague?)
When they caught you in the act
And dragged you back to do the rest of your time.
On The Existence of Doubt
If she entertained any doubts
About the meaning of life the old woman
Kept them to herself, like china she trusted
No one to wash.
Once she mentioned a feeling of unworthiness.
Once she expressed regret for some impatience.
When she was a girl on the Prairies
The winters were longer
But the skies were bigger
And there were no coastal mountains to hem you in
And no coast
Why must we relinquish these things –
Children untarnished in their frames, the tobacco pot
Smelling of Father’s pipe, rhubarb’s
Great fleshy ears
Funneling rain back into the earth?
Once, long ago, when they were tidying
The grass around her own mother’s stone,
Her child enquired about her Faith
In God and Heaven and Meeting Again.
The Old Rugged Cross, wasn’t that the hymn?
Children should not ask questions.
For Now
On my desktop I’ve saved the photograph.
Her at the kitchen table
In the last house but one.
In no time she’ll be backing out –
Juice oranges, bacon, eggs,
Top up gas (PetroCanada down a cent) –
But for now she consents to sit
And her dressing gown’s carnation pink
Is set off by the periwinkle
Blue jug of milk; against her breast she cradles
The new child
And behind through unrained-on glass
Blissfully climbing to the August sky
Are the pinprick
Lights of a stalk of rue.
Old Women
after Baudelaire
In the winding folds of old capitals
Where all, horror, even, is enchanting,
I – alert to the inevitable –
Spy some beings, decrepit and charming.
Monstrosities, once young and beautiful –
Éponine…Laïs! We love their humped backs
And twisted limbs! Monsters, they are souls still.
Under holey skirts and skimpy fabrics
They creep, whipped by the north wind’s spiteful clacks,
Startled by the roar of some omnibus,
Clutching to their sides, like precious relics,
A purse stitched with flowers or a rebus;
They drag themselves like wounded animals,
They lurch and totter like marionettes.
Or they dance without meaning to, poor bells
A heartless demon tugs on. They are wrecks,
But their eyes, that are sharp as gimlets still,
Shine like the
holes water sleeps in at night;
Their eyes are the eyes of the little girl
Who laughs in wonder at everything bright.
I’ve watched so many of these old women!
One, one late afternoon when sunset streaked
The sky with a bloody vermillion,
Sat on a bench, alone, lost in thought,
For one of those band concerts rich in brass,
With which soldiers are wont to flood our parks,
And which, on gold evenings that revive us,
Spark heroism in civilian hearts.
This woman, proud, spine ramrod straight,
Eyes widening at times like an old eagle’s,
Was soaking up the vital warrior beat;
Her marble brow looked fit for laurels.
A Happy Ending
It is Christmas Day evening in our village – my husband’s village – in Provence. One of the cousins remembers a story, old doings still present in her mind. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.
Story-telling is an art in Provence. Everyone has a fund of tales. The pauses, the winks, the sotto voce, the gestures, the audience as claque and chorus. But last winter our cousin tripped and fell; now sometimes she’s fine, others she forgets who is alive, who has died, what happened to this one, what to another. Her husband is worried. Suppose she muddles the storyline? Maybe he should tell the story? She gives him a scornful look…
It was noon; we’d just arrived in the village and I was hurrying across the square to the grocery shop. Victorine, who is leaning as usual on the parapet of her terrace, calls down to me:
So, you’ve come to stay for a while?
Yes, but I have to get to the shop before it closes, I’ll stop on my way back.
*
Careful, M’s husband warns, and he also points out that her stocking has wrinkled down. She pulls it up.
*
There was only one customer in the shop. She wasn’t from here. Pierrette was putting her purchases into her basket, one, two, three, four, five tomatoes, and then – hup! – she glances at me over the other woman’s head and shrugs, as if to say, I have to get rid of this one too – and she adds the sixth tomato, which is rotten, and the customer who isn’t from here says thank you and goes out.
Pierrette looks at me, excited. The mayor’s wife died!
What happened?
She ate and she ate and she ate, and she swelled and she swelled and she swelled, and then she died.
I go back across the square with my basket of groceries. Victorine is still leaning with her arms folded on the parapet of her terrace waiting for me.
Did you hear? she asks.
About the mayor’s wife? Yes, what happened?
She ate and she ate and she ate, and she wasted and she wasted and she wasted, and then she died.
*
Brava! M’s husband cries. Brava – ! He is glad. She remembered all the story’s details in the correct order.
We are all glad. We are picking at the Christmas leftovers in our cousins’ house. The storytellers are telling their stories, the same events in the same order with the same happy endings. Nothing has changed.
Happy he who like Ulysses
after du Bellay
Happy he who like Ulysses has made
A fine voyage, or won the Golden Fleece,
And returned, full of wisdom and sense,
To live with his kin the rest of his days.
When will I see again my little village
Chimney smoking, and in what season
The hedges around my modest cottage,
Which is my province and my heart’s reason?
I prefer the house my ancestors built
To a Roman palace’s grand fronton,
Better than hard marble I like thin slate:
My Gallic Loire over Tiber’s Latin,
My little Liré over Palatine,
Better than sea air, the mild Angevine.
Winter Pears
On the road that descends into La Roque,
After the picnic table
And high-perched cemetery, a pear tree gnarls
Up from a farmyard, hoarding its pears.
A sin to let these fat pears go to waste,
This abundance my fingers ache to pick
(Rotting fruit already litters the ground):
I knock at the farmhouse and ask,
Do they belong to the pears and may we pick some?
But the woman drying her hands on a tea towel
Smiles no, not her pears,
They belong – she points farther down –
The house we stopped at yesterday to read
The handwritten warning tacked to the gate
mon chien court les 200m en 10 secondes
si tu cours moins vite
restes au portail et sonnes!
my dog covers 200m in 10 seconds
if you don’t run that fast
stay at the gate and ring!
We ring, the dog comes belting,
I snatch my hand back
And wait for the lady of the house
In plaid felt slippers
Who is just fine with us picking some pears.
Don’t you eat them? I ask.
A few, she hedges,
Adding, They’re winter pears, they’re hard,
Good only for cooking.
This morning, breakfast done, I lift the pears
From the top of the fridge, and I sort them –
The unblemished
And the windfalls. I take the black-handled,
Paper-thin knife that has been in the kitchen
The knife that brings to my mind
The black-handled knives that Chardin
Places slantwise across his surfaces,
Utensils
That give his paintings their illusion of depth;
And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore
Tunnels of worms.
I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh
Is almost translucent,
I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea
(I burned the old one),
Add a trickle of water
And leave them to simmer.
Three Fragments
The third is a woman’s head.
She is watching the bread rise.
The loaves sit on the yellow-tiled counter
Below the stopped clock.
Her head fills with the smell of yeast.
*
Periwinkle blue the sun
Behind the church. And gold to the east where chestnut leaves
Flicker down, toss, curl
In gutters. Soon the teams
Of sweepers, the chorus of brooms.
*
Blue says Tragedy. Red replies Comedy.
The argument continues into the night.
Many Moons
A mystery why that plus-size moon
Bobbing in the front window
Disappears if I tilt to the left
– a trick I repeat like the child
who throws
a toy from his crib and reels it back in –
gone back gone back
Till it dawns on me that that mother of a moon
Stealing the show
From planes stacked to land at SFO,
A planet or two, and a raft of stars
That for all I know
Are just the after-glow
of their long-extinguished selves,
Is merely a reflection of the one
Just now
Sailing free of the redwood trees in the window
behind me.
Behind
Javier Garcerà, Madrid
Your new canvas was a honeycomb
Of windows through the fretwork leaves,
Panes too far or too small to see in.
I am interested in what behin
d means,
You said. Which was all you’d say.
Tracery leaves, lit panes and a sunset-
Through-pollution bleed: overlaid planes
Of the perceptible
Before the voracious mind barges in
Waking meaning’s echo chamber.
From your studio wall a mirror
Looked back at us, and at you behind,
Dousing the spoon-bright anchovies
In olive oil,
Uncorking the slatey Portuguese wine.
The Sand Dollar Inn
Ocean Views from Every Room
Here, engraved in someone else’s
Name, is a bench where we can sit
And watch the waves go in and out.
Lean back, sop up the horizontal sun
Trawling west across the Strait.
Why don’t I leave you here?
Why don’t I take a stroll out where
The tide will turn, that wave-stamped
Strand of wetter, darker sand
Where families shore up their castle walls
And sift debris for intact shells
Faux gems of bottle glass and fossil scraps
Of runic, worm-written wood
The sea collects for us to hold.