Darrell
Bourque
A WOMAN CLINGS TO THE IDEA OF
WHAT MIGHT HAVE PASSED
FOR LOVE AND WHAT SHE HOPES
MIGHT COME TO PASS AGAIN
(after
Leon Stokesbury and Vermeer)
She reads the whole note once
again.
We can tell it is winter from
the ermine-
lined jacket she wears
indoors.In the morning
when he left he left his scent
inside the rain-
dampened air.She was a kind of
woman
who could cling to, if she had
wanted, greater things—
a reputation in the town for
some good use, omen
prophesying beneficence that
would come her way, a string
of pearls a painter had tried
to give her strung onto yellow ribbon.
But his pale husk she has in
her hands, now thin
and fair reminder of sacrament
live flesh retains.
In this city by the sea one is
encouraged to learn to read winds.
She puts the letter away, has
a fleeting thought about wages of sin,
and then she reads the whole
note once again.
October 25, 1999
GIOTTO’S ANGELS
(Giotto’s
Lamentation, 1305-1306.
Fresco,
7 ft. 7 in. x 7 ft. 9 in.
Arena
Chapel, Padua.)
I have always loved those
grieving angels
in Giotto’s Lamentation.Each
one, grave
contentious rhyme for the
mirrored loss
below.Giotto lets us see here
and there
these were airy beings once, a
robe blurs
into dark blue ether, one is
held hovering
under tongues of flame.This is
the angel
of things to come. The
domination in this
scene though is gravitas,
the fiery angel’s
little companion makes an arch
of back
and head in stiff-armed
desolation, two
of them bring clasped hands to
their necks
as though blood of earthly
love coursed
in that holy passageway, two
extend arms
from the body in a gesture
making prayer
of the human heart.But these
creatures,
we are told, have no heart as
we know heart,
have no blood, no sex, no
hands to pull up
to fleshy faces.No robes as
such to bring
to the face to wipe tears from
their eyes.
Yet, there they are, and here
we are, wanting
to call them brother, sister,
recognizing
our rent in theirs, even if
they cannot be
rent.And the other peculiarity
they give
witness to: on the ground
their rhymed
sodality is struck with a
muted airiness
they will never be used to;
they do not know
where they are, or how to
breathe in the heft
of sorrow in the air all
around them; where
heart is, or how to hold on to
the very thing
that kept them tethered to
this world and to
the very lives they had just
begun to love so
before this last disconsolate
leap let them go.
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON IN A
DUTCH COURTYARD:
MENAGE A TROIS WITH CHILD WITNESS
(A
Dutch Courtyard,
Pieter
de Hooch ,
1629-1683)
What these people have
withdrawn from is large.
Immeasurable is what they have
been drawn toward.
A whole town with churches and
a marketplace, barges
in the waterways near the
loading docks, the guard
drowsing near the banking
house with gleaming sword
lie in the precincts just
beyond their wall.A red serge
she’s opted for is but one
bright, desired thing; a word
in private, full tankards,
exchangeable heat.Courage
is what it takes to cash in
toil for velvets and leather,
or to catch the beauty of a
man’s limb and not flinch;
in the lifted glass she tells
them afternoons in the heather
field is a possibility if they
play their cards right. Wench
is a laughable appellation in
this close company. Whether
or not ships sail, a
possibility; glee in moorings, a cinch.
November 2000
DÜRER’S APOLLO
When Dürer drew Apollo, he placed
him in a light-
er colored field surrounded by
a golden
border.My friend Bill says it
looks like a white kite,
this space the god stands in
where he’s shown holding
a happy sun.It is always
morning here, flight
from morning some derivation of
morning still; molten
noon, just morning
terrified.We see what we might
call the lazy afternoon or
advent of evening.Moldings
in our houses shift in dying
light, a trick for our eyes
mostly.We even call dark relief,
but Dürer was in love
with this god.He works the
god’s gold into hair that lies
on his manly shoulders in the
portraits, in the gloves
of buttery yellow he gives
himself to wear, in the ties
gleaming on his blouse and
coat, in Great Turf, groves,
bees.Radiant prayer, world
where morning never dies.
November 2000
POSING FOR OUR FIRST COMMUNION
PICTURE
The fields my father and my
uncles plowed are the backdrop
for this picture.My cousin’s
hair is clipped close to the skin
like mine.Our ears are large flowers
blooming off our faces.
My mother is wishing this
cleanness she’s witnessing will last,
but she knows we will tunnel
our way back toward waywardness
like the goat boys we
are.According to her, we will be standing
in the next frames with girls,
their short red skirts occasions
of sin, if not sin itself
outright.We are like birds, tethered, or
refrains in gypsy
songs.Cameras will catch us again like this
against the church door before
and after services.My aunt asks
when we get home for just one
more.We will pause, but barely.
We hurry to the house, loosen
ties we never wear, start to change.
November 2000
he thinks he can hear the water
moving between the riverbanks.
Heat leaves the land quickly
here but falling asleep had fallen
upon him as tenderly as a
light kiss.But then something tearing
him brought water to his
eyes.Light or flesh he could not see
held him in this too closedness
he knew would stop his breath.
This angel, if we can call it
that, would make him cry out
and then it would let him go.
It would watch, it seemed,
for the breathing to slacken
to normalcy and then come for him
again and again. That is until
Jacob, old grabber of heals,
would finally fight the fight
so truly the angel would be forced
to beg for leave.Jacob thinks
he may have died that night,
reminds himself the muscled
dream surely faded in the morning
light.But what is he to make
of this new body in the broad field
he has been told is his new
name?And what is this fierce
angelism he feels behind him
rustling his blouse, moving slowly
through the hairs on the back
of his head? Oh, fierce friend,
I limp like a prayer, cannot
breathe at all without you now.
He is a boy still, but
barely.He has separated himself
from all others he came here
with at this watery retreat
his mother takes her family
and friends and her priest
to in the summers.That is,
everyone except this one
who gazes up at him leaning
into the world, held back
by the railings on the
balcony.Everything behind him
is a blur so that we cannot
see details in the structures.
What we can see though are the
edges of the wide gulf,
placidity itself objectified
in this captured light.It is
mostly this broad blankness
this boy will grow toward.
There are no sailing boats in
this expanse of water.
There are no cities in the
distance, nor horses running
across the turf in the mottled
light the camera catches
too.It will not be something
we will have to accustom
ourselves to, calling him
Father.None of us have seen
him in this picture yet. None
of us have had the chance
to cling to the boy in it
about to slip into the unexpected
curve he is shaping in this
quiet moment definitively his.
Fishing we usually call it
here.A mother fishes for clues
to her children’s secretive
lives in the piles of clothes
they relinquish to her for
laundering.Another mother
occupies herself with other
thoughts—too risky this
fishing.She might catch much
more than she knows
what to do with.A boy fishes
for the signals that keep
promising to add up to
something.Another takes ends
of strings, all too willing to
be the fish in these scenes.
He will let an Ariadne pull
him out of the maze.Easy
work.He has only to respond to
tug and taut in string.
Some fishermen don’t know the
first thing about waters
they fish in.Some girls fish
with their eyes, use other
body parts when eyes don’t
work. The really bold cast
into the openness of heart,
mind even.Some girls, boys
learn to fish in the wine
market, on the tops of stoves.
My father-in-law liked the
idea of having me in a boat
for whole afternoons.On the
way out to les Fordoches
he pointed out the water
moccasins sunning themselves
in the Spanish moss clusters
overhead, thick black coils
in delicate gray nests.He
pointed them out on fallen trees
lying in the coffee-colored
shallows at the front of his boat,
and the small alligators too
sleeping in the mud flats near
the banks on either side.I saw
to it that he liked the idea
only once. My mother sees
fishing as the making of things.
Her table is full.The platters
are steaming.Her children
are happy.My father and I
filet our catches of sheephead,
redfish and speckled trout.We
gut foot tubs of sac-a-lait,
bream.Fishing for my mother is
an ichthyophagous dream.
But old women fishing from
bridges fish mostly just for fish.
September 1999
that once those chicken trees
took root no rescuer would ever stay
their capricious takeover.He
didn’t use the word capricious, rather
he stalled over some other
word skewered on the scaley contusions
within him, something that
felt to him like reversal of large purpose
he was in charge of when
already he knew he had barely enough time
to do what he had to.He
brought his foot to the tractor brake,bailed
himself out of his seat and
hobbled his way into an old bamboo grove
where I had passed the morning
listening to the crickets making songs
out of the most rudimentary
sounds, leg rubbings put to use of shrill
music.I almost talked to him
of leaves, posteriority and diminishment
in relation to loam
production, low shrubbery and thickets in relation
to the architecture of rabbit
warrens, the way these very trees turn rusty,
purpleand golden in autumn,
inflame the very world we live in, ways
one might scan the teals
bobbing on the pond or egrets on a bare branch.
But we never got to any of
that.Him just seeing me at some inexplicably
triangulated pause in the
woods like that left him with only the stupefying
catchbasin of a thought that
anyone would want to save Chinese tallow
trees for anything.What he
carried to the John Deere had the heft of slate.
The tractor idled on the
roadside like a tired cantor practicing weary notes.
The arc of his too many jobs
in the afternoon and neighborly strangeness
lined up before him as stratifiedand
incontrovertible as Euclidean thought.
Go
to Creative Writing Home Page
Go to English
Department Home Page
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing Concentration
of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English
Department, Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone,
337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.