Читать книгу The Audible and the Evident - Julie Hanson - Страница 11

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Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

Each morning my eye goes straight to the high bare branches of the ash

where a plastic Hy-Vee bag tugs and puffs

but has no choice.

Well I won’t see that in France,

I say to myself, but the consolation is as temporary

as the trip will have been

once I’m standing here again,

staring at that bag

and thinking, Now that’s the kind of thing I never saw in France.

It looks so orphaned and waif-like

against the shiny gray bark of the ash and the muted gray of the sky,

so white, so insubstantial, so wanting,

and, even with its one red word,

so caught there in the tree.

I’m certain it can hang on to the branch that has pierced it

for another six weeks.

There may be another bag in the maple by then,

recently freed from a thatch of wet leaves

or come tumbling

lightly from the garbage truck

that will have taken on that day no offering from us.

On the day we come back, it will still be

bare as scattered bones out there,

not yet the middle of March.

the ground will be hard. The grass will be tan.

This is so like me,

imagining,

not the cottage roofs of flat stones

pictured in the Green Guide to the Dordogne,

the massive ramparts for the great gone door of Domme,

but the day after—these littered horizons, and winter

still trying to get out of the yard.

On the day we come back

the ground will be hard. The grass will be tan.

But there will come a day much deeper into spring,

a day shady and humid

in the unfurled foliage of June,

when I realize I haven’t thought about that bag in weeks

because I can’t see it at all,

I can’t see its branch.

The massive ramparts for the great gone door of Domme

will have lost a lot of bulk by then,

resembling more and more the sketch

on page twenty-one

in the Green Guide to the Dordogne.

The Audible and the Evident

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