Six poems

Amie

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Clotilde found me in the hayloft, sticking straws under my nails. She saw where I’d scratched a broken cross on my wrist where veins sketch a blue delta. And she shrieked, the cuts smeared with blood. Qu’est-ce que tu fais? T’es folle, Fernande! What could I say? I thought, Here. Dig in. Plough the furrow with a heart. Put your mark on me. But she took a kerchief, spit on it and wiped me clean. Ça veut dire quoi? My answer froze to filaments of frost, which came to kill the crops early that year. And when she saw the silence in me settling like drifts of white, she kissed the words I swallowed as snow. First, little bisous all over my cheeks, flakes or flecks of wet. Little bisous until one full baiser on my mouth. I saw a field of stars blinking blue and pink around me, stars such as my mother never stitched, a galaxy of guilt and want. And the place between my legs shivered in one huge surge of wave, the way the wheat bends in a coursing curve of gold when the wind gusts once, fast, against it. T’es folle, Fernande, she said again. And only the horses spoke back to her, with whinnies and tail swishes muffled from below. Only the horses-

Printemps

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Clotilde and I hid in the woods when the trees hazed with petals, pink and white, drowsed air with the dew scent of pollen. A clamor of bees. Birds in the branches swelling silence full of song. A world so delicate it felt, should one petal drift down on a wind too rough, the child inside would crumble. Clotilde said to lie down. I lay flat against moss, while she pulled my dress over my head, my bloomers down my legs. Bare, I felt not her hand but the brush of blossoms, as she swished my skin with a stick of crab apple. I giggled at the tickle, watched her undress. She lowered herself upon me, her hair a pour of gold that got in my eyes, so I saw as through gauze, sun shining through blazing strands. Light passing through dapples of shadow-off and on, off and on. I took her nipples in my mouth, closed buds with the velvet of a flower before it blooms. Her head bent back, her eyes closed. Her hands moving down until she put her fingers in the place I kept secret for my father. How it opened for her, moist as the morning, and she massaged me there, my blood louder than birds coursing through acres of echo. As she opened her mouth, flicking her tongue in my pinkest flesh, a humming sang there and up my spine, a glow spread to the edges of what I had known. And somewhere in silence I heard myself calling her name. As if she would be the one. As if she could stop the child from falling. Clotilde-

Grenouilles

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When from the ponds a loud, imprudent purring would pulse the air with echo, like a sheet of silver shaken, like a riot of love-then, rubber-booted and trousered like boys, Clotilde and I would hunt frogs where they clogged the shallows with wriggle. Barehanded, we’d grab them. Sometimes they’d pee, a hot drizzle the housewives warned would give us warts. We’d try to soothe them, stroking their throats, that soft place like a satin purse. Always, we dropped them in our buckets, one after another: from the smooth lounge of a lily pad to the slosh of this cold tin enclosure. What is the soul of a frog? Clotilde said maybe it’s something small like the gnats they swallow. Maybe it flies off with a gnat’s shrill wail when the frog is wounded. I said maybe the soul of a frog is another frog that hatches the moment the first frog is caught, on and on, the life in them hopping frog to egg, the way their bodies move in leaps and spasms. Maybe all frogs are really one frog. Does God love the one soul of frogs? But-aie!-what would come of them, of their mortal parts, petits innocents, martyrs sans méfiance? We’d hoist our kicking buckets, two apiece, to the brasserie in town, where the proprietor would give us a few centimes and offer us a croque-monsieur for lunch. Pretty girls like you, he’d say, should know a frog is like a woman; the best parts are the legs. Biting into my sandwich, I’d curse him, then cross myself to ward off the wickedness rising, as the sad frogs rose from bottom-muck and slime to be stabbed by a chef’s skewer. And Clotilde, seeing me, would undo her braid and flounce her blonde hair over her shoulders: Fernande, I see warts on your face already-

Chemin de Fer

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Everything’s going away. The sad hush of rain dims the echo of a child on the platform, calling, calling her dog, her voice high and thin as the small wailing of mosquitoes swarming the marsh places, now empty of heat. Through runnels streaming the window, I see Clotilde, her face inside my reflection, thrown back by the ambient light: we were part of each other, we were inside each other, we doubled together as one ghost. How does the soul leave the body and the body go on, forgetting… The man in the grey coat who turned to give us a sudden, concentrated look when we embraced, embarrassed by the thin crowd descending, embarking, hurriedly in the rain-this man’s gaze portends no good. I see Clotilde waving, waving, inside the apple of my face, her hand around a kerchief to keepsake a meteor shower of lost days. It’s as if her aunt came here to haunt us, to say, On fera des voyages de silence. You’ll be alone, finding each other in stranger’s arms, alone in the rain that burns you, wet in the way of fire, soft in the way of iron-

Tante

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Taunt her and she’d cut you down, Clotilde’s Tante Cerise. A cabaret singer sassy as a slap on the wrist, she’d tell stories of spotlights, smoky rooms, eyes spying legs long, bare as roads in winter and the black bush between them, though she was hot as a coal in a cookstove. Call me Cherry, mon cher, she’d say and pop a maraschino in her mouth, pull it out by its stem, her lips O, O, O so red and ready. Then, so they’d know no fool but a true siren was toying with them, she’d drop the delicacy, the sweet, liqueur-soaked orb, back inside, bite, swallow. The stories: sooty, as if her words left a smudge on your skin, the chalk delicious-soft and warm. The stories got around. Papa jeered, Cette salope! Told me if I went to Clotilde’s when Cerise was there, he’d cloister me for a year. We’d keep quiet, nos bouches fermées autour de notre Cerise… People forget about Salome, that she was a dutiful daughter, dancing for her beau-père, answering to her maman. If she could dance, unscarving her seven veils, if she could look upon a holy man’s head as if it were châteaubriand, leaking blood on a plate, and not flinch-was she to blame? She was raised as a body, as a cherry… When Cerise went off, she’d leave some photos, some small placards, some scribblings of men’s names. These we’d pour over, lying on the bare floor of Clotilde’s room, her cats sleeping on straw chairs around us, purring the pure song, and we’d scheme-how to be kittenish as coquettes, how to flirt sure and shameless. The king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And the damsel answered, give me my maidenhead which thou covetest-

Tante

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Pigeons in the church eaves asked, Who? Who? Who was she now, on the other side of morning, as on the side of the moon only far stars could see if there weren’t darkness in heaven as on earth, and light on earth to blur the round moon’s shine to nothing by day… Elle est morte, Clotilde said, wide-dry-eyed and shaking. The story came as stones dredged from riverbed. How she was stalked by an admirer who, after seeing her shake veils and shimmy to songs of strut and woo, wound his body around hers in an alley… When the bells tolled, more silence than sound, we stepped as though all earth held her grave. Who? Who? Tu, tuée, grieved the round, grey doves, pouring their parlance on the air like rain when sun knows no water. To remember her, we went down to where wall crumbles, the old wall circling our village since Roman times. Lilacs bloomed against stone, shook in wind against stone, their odor no less than heavy. To remember, we snapped clusters, made ourselves chew, swallow the bruise of their hue: to taste the brutality God chose over beauty-