| We Have Traveled Here by Andrena Zawinski | ||
All along the line these villages blossom with poppies, sheep and ponies graze backyards, cows are down for rain. A couple poses tied up in lacy bows among the jonquil and nasturtium for photographers on their wedding day, as we near the northerly reaches of Normandy, stark cabanas locked down from a fickle fleet of summer winds moving in. It is almost sundown, almost August. A woman pushes a broom through our train car, in second class, in half-light. She smiles at our French affectations as you kiss me on a train making our way away from Paris. Along the noisy rails, leggy geraniums stretch red and weedy at lazy sills outside the city limits, sleepy windows shuttered from light. At Treport de la Mer, the sky dims inside the northern night, waves collide, the wind whips the two of us to each other bundled by arms, intoxicated in an unseasonable chill, exhaustion of a day spent well walking the rocky length of coast, climbing hills to a sun bleached cliff where Hugo once paused at Le Calvaire and Beaudelaire wrote pour les morts, les pauvres morts, where what we have seen here survives enemy artillery fire across the wild lavender, Germans perched, hungry crows cawing the Atlantic wall. Such a gray light midsummer. So dark the waters here where we have traveled half the day to be, gulls raspy on a somber sweep of sky, icy waves racing the harbor we watch from our coastal landing, from our turret room where we sink down into a bed fat with feathers and frills, turn off the light. As if we have waited our lives for this, we pull in close to each other, bloom in our extravagance of France, learn the simplest lessons of love, our hearts memorizing them even as we dream. For what else then can we long? For now, curled into each other, we can call this home.
ANDRENA ZAWINSKI is the author of (click title) Traveling in Reflected Light, released by Pig Iron Press as a Kenneth Patchen Prize in Poetry. She lives in the Bay Area of California. Her poetry has won awards for free verse and for poetry of social concern and has appeared in many fine publications including Santa Clara Review, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Paterson Literary Review, Nimrod International and others with work forthcoming in Xanadu and Rattle. She is Feature Editor at PoetryMagazine.com Click here to read more of Andrena Zawinski's poetry. Also: http://trfn.clpgh.org/tpq/elegies.html and http://www.trollop.com/people/az |