4/12/2016
"Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux?"
"My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path, a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed?"
Charles Baudelaire
I sat on the mossy footstool
that lied by the brook-
I had to really open my ears
to hear the soft regurgitation
coming from the clear muddy water, gliding over the slate,
piled up
the road, the one I drove on that one day we snuck out,
was placed gently beside it,
uptop a little cliff,
I felt this a beatific metaphor.
The air felt amorphous,
held a quality I couldn't quite
put my finger on.
and then I saw a tree,
a crooked one
who had seemed to grow
on the bank of the creek
because life, it seems, imitates art.
Its trunk dipped
until it ever so slightly grazed the water
its elm fingers
almost
almost.
I smiled when I saw this,
for it gave me hope.
I likened myself to the horseflies and new
tadpoles that flittered,
seraphic in quality,
borne with the quality of new life- the innocent quality
the one that just made me feel tainted, the more I surrounded myself with it.
The Friday afternoons on the avenue, with its port wine air
and this bubbling black slate brook
are the only places
that innocence lives-
if I had realized how quiet
the soft gargling of the cherub water was
I'd have stopped the car
and baptized ourselves
In it.