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.