And does it matter on which side of the river
the snow fell heaviest?
French girls and boys,
sparrowed with the lightest teuton accent.
And the cathedral poking up
through the all-around mists.
Was this the new Cimmeria?
Miners mined and died under the earth,
the distant stamping might just as well be cavaliers or bison.
Or a tribe of Godivas, naked in their suits of gold.
The falling snow took the light into itself,
falling for miles in every direction.
A million flakes spun per minute,
the sun withdrawn into its overcoat of cloud.
The beck, blue as iris under its glass icing,
poplars spaced at intervals to show the bankslope’s edging.
Like the tips of gloved fingers on a frosted pane
the black coats of the schoolchildren smudged the mist,
making their careful way home, stalked by squirrels in camouflage.
***
Water and paper.
The one to evaporate.
The other to erase.
Water, rippling in lakes and basins,
sitting still in pans and puddles,
trickling from spouts,
cascading the spillways,
spreading across fields
through their grid of tame channels.
Slow-moving in gentle weather,
or rushing, snow-swollen and wild,
careening the Meuse’s deep bed
that was more ancient,
by an ice-age or two,
than the earliest birth date
on the oldest headstone
in the town’s several cemeteries.
Paper was a middling luxury,
never to be wasted,
but always to be had.
By butcher, priest, mayor,
schoolmaster, and, of course,
the Courier des Ardennes
with its finger-blackening tidings.
***
The river leaped its banks the first week of February,
caught M. Mersault asleep, among his plagiaries and second-hand books.
The neighborhood children helped him carry the soggy objects
through the bone-chill of the knee-deep waters,
up to the lane’s unrutted gravel.
And urged on by his nervous, high-pitched instructions,
had set the books like little scarecrows,
upright and covers spread,
while the seamstress,
with her bemused and skeptical eye,
parted the pages with a hundred tiny needles.
The frozen day turned sunny,
the bindings clicked and snapped,
spines bubbled and cracked,
and the volumes bloated to twice their size,
grotesque but salvaged.
***
Chalk, in all the primary colors,
the occasional red or blue pencil,
a small box of paste-like paints,
crumbly as cheese but made fluid,
revivified with a drop of oil, a drop of water.
Black dots were the tutelaries of the page.
Charleville (.)
Paris (.)
Rome (.)
Jerusalem (.)
Land was terra brown or sandy yellow,
blue for lakes and rivers,
green for forests and jungles,
slate-gray for mountain ranges
(Roland prancing tiny
his Aeolian taratantara ;
Prometheus giving up
his daily liver
to the louse-sized eagle). Oceans, vast
even when single-sheeted on the sloping desks
of the classroom, imagined themselves as black,
though the children left them white and untouched.
***
Rampant in the narrow summer streets,
with the summer sky widening above the
meadows and their boundary of woods.
A kite, a wheel, a stick.
Or barefoot among tadpoles and lazy king-size wasps.
Christ smiled above his cravat,
smoothed his hair beneath a child’s paper hat.
Suffer the little ones to come forth,
emptying the streets of their barbarian cries,
puffing rosy cheeks to bellow froth as free as dandelion,
swallow deep the sweet generosity of cream and sugar
at the bakery’s back door.
A slurry of stones tipped and settling
in the deep moist echo of a water well
once used by pilgrims and hunters.
The quick turn-off from the country lanes
and the race into the high grass,
the unframed meadow beyond.
The breathless race to a skid-stop
in the rich turf ending at ditch’s edge,
with a flood of mushrooms,
shining pale as blue dawn,
pristine beneath the buzz
of nectar-hunting overseers.
***
Only when it was long gone
would the easy gentility of the provinces
seem to mark those remembered seasons
with a golden light, a sunflower’s shadow
on an overgrown porch.
For now there was a child’s half-savage chaos,
herded into the black arms of order.