Poetry |

from the “Monpeyroux Sonnets”

Monpeyroux Sonnets 2

 

 

A rainy Monday, everything is shut.

It could be late October; it’s mid-May.

Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on gray

paving stones, drainpipes, voices. Nothing but

water on roof tiles in a steady beat,

the postman’s motorcycle passing by,

not stopping. Tomorrow, the bakery,

grocer, butcher — bread, vegetables, meat,

revivifying possibility

of a ‘bonjour’ exchanged with an unknown

person, whose eyes express the smile,

question, mistrust or curiosity

her or his face mask almost hides, as I

exhale uneasily behind my own.

 

 

Exhale uneasily. Behind my own

pretense of standing firmly, I’m unsteady

 on my feet, impatient but unready

 to take one more step, toward some overgrown

 weed-wilded plot. Leaden feet weigh me down

 on the empty morning street. Ahead, I

 see the post office, clock tower. I buy bread. I

 buy a bunch of red onions. The town

 is quiet as the plague that got its claws

 into the blue-green globe a year ago.

 Queasily accustomed to the laws

 that change monthly, the shops shuttered because …

 I make my way, awkwardly lame and slow,

 up sloping streets out of DiChirico

 

 

Up sloping streets out of DiChirico,

too clean, too empty, garrulous grans indoors,

kids quiet, holiday-rental visitors

quarantined in cities, the status quo

is stasis. Now, here, stays here and now:

curfew, a trajectory that blurs

the border of the ten kilometres

allowed beyond the door. Today, tomorrow,

something will change, the wind, the rules, the weather,

a numbness, swelling, or suspicious cough.

 Yesterday, in late sunlight, on an off-

 road, a brown horse stood in a field,

 flanks aglow in the slant light , untethered

 and shimmering in a stasis that seemed wild.

 

 

Shimmering in a stasis that seems wild,

unseasonable, unpredictable

as thunderstorms or canicule in April,

the certainty of change. There was a tiled

corridor; the amputated, undefiled

torso of a boy in stippled marble;

a bird that cawed, that whistled, one that warbled;

a sketch of an old man reading, sketch of a child

herself bending to draw a hopscotch grid

near the gazebo on the village square.

I sat on a bench there. I thought of Claire

eighty-two years ago — a similar

village, the same grid, during the drôle de guerre,

not thinking she’d write about it. But she did.

 

 

Not thinking he’d write about it, still, he did,

first scribbling birdtracks on a yellow lined

pad – place-names, objects left behind,

in his three languages. He stopped in mid-

phrase (they weren’t sentences) as a word fled,

or was it the object, shimmering in mind,

but disappearing, shrinking to a blind

spot with a velvet aura. He shook his head,

rubbed his eyes, squinting, put down the pen,

light pricking them like summer dust that stings.

Beyond the window, a street full of things

in motion, even when they were still.

That wasn’t the road leading out of Tell

Abyad, that he was walking on again,

 

 

Walking out of the ruined town again,

having gone back to probe the rubble, look

for what was left of the school, the mosque, the book-

shop, where after school daily eight or ten

children would awkwardly appear, and listen

to tales they’d coax from him — he shook,

despite himself. Here was the souk,

or had been. No ma’anouche, no heaps of green

and russet vegetables, no polyester

djellabas, no men, no women, no mercantile

palaver, only an urban vacant lot,

cardboard boxes, dogshit, a scrawny cat,

and plastic bags of household trash in piles

on rubble. I’m not him. But I was there.

 

 

I’m not there, probing the rubble. I wasn’t there

with cousins in Gaza as the bombs

exploded. Israeli bombs. Agents have names.

I’m not holding the pen that doesn’t spare

me. No sleep. The pointless vigils wear

me down. Bad back. Bad conscience. Spasms

drizzle and clutch my spine, and open chasms

of half-remembered mishaps, terror, error.

To walk out through the fields was easier

than through damp city streets that probed my pain

(or joy) sometimes, with something to discover,

translate, transform, enumerate again

at every corner bus stop, shop front. But

it’s Monday. Almost everything is shut.

Contributor
Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015)two collaborative books, A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, 2021), and Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (Holland Park Press, 2014), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan,  2010). Her eighteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleaides Press, 2020) and Claire Malroux’s Daybreak (NY Review Books 2020). Calligraphies will be published by W.W. Norton early in 2023. She lives in Paris.  

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