Boucharderen, Tripping in France

Two Bits from France - 1

I sit and write away the others’ lives.
I write off populations with my pen.
Regardless of these warriors and their wives
who wrangle in my sight, I fence them in
entangling them in rhymes to chase chagrin.
What had been strife collapses into smile.
The couples cozy up – that extra mile
they had thought too far is one they walk with ease
because my pens today is fraught of guile
and only want to cheer, encourage, please.

Two Bits from France - 2

I found a snail, and a pair of pliers,
and a bench you painted blue.
A patch of sun anointed Friars
out pointing what you knew:
the path to where the pilgrims trod.

Late summer in France. A working eight-day session of professional painters and sculptors in the middle of France.

Beautiful setting, charming manor house, great French lunches outside under the plane trees.

Only one person in residence not taking any course: me.

Gave me time to observe and write.

The Russet Shellless Snails

How many colors populate his place?
Four russet shellless snails assist my count.
The subtle white of puffy flowers whose flat leaves
boast greens enough for many different gowns.
Most of the blooms boast private well-shelled snails,
each with a riotous, tasteful blend of browns
with bands that are a darker shade of dawn.
The arborvitae’s yellow is too simple
to name its variations on dark green.
The berry bushes burst with red and black.
The stonewall stonewalls color, but its hues
of sand and shadow backdrop one red rose
whose perfect-flower edge descends to brown
as what was bud then bloom moves to decay.
The russet snails, like sea lions seen from planes,
seem all immobile less I really look.
One turns its head; antennae sample wind.

The others – the cursisten* – were painting and sculpting and I was left to my own devices, doing ‘finger exercises’ to get in the swing of writing poetry.

I gave myself an exercise: looking at a bush in the beautiful, perfectly kept gardens at La Roche Culturelle, LOOKING to SEE how many colors there were.

*Cursist is a nice Dutch word – someone taking a course (cursus)

Beyond Caring

“Oh Sean,” said Anne, “the ocean is too wide
to think across, and after you set sail
you left my mind. You were closer had you died.
I cannot mind, for minding must entail
sensation. Separate shore surfs scrub the Braille
our hands read on each other. It is lost.
What I had hoped was permanently embossed
on both of us – a love for all our days –
survived no better than the notes I tossed
in bottles in your wake. No sailor stays.”

Sloth Full

You could as well say Howard is giraffe full
as curse the sloth for slothfulness – it’s fast
enough for what it does, and Howard’s tall.

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Why do
these children fly?
Which of them flexing wings
will carry on to any place
they love?

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The hills of home were hills like these.
The apples look the same.
And I still think I want to please.
I answer to my name.
I stand when ladies enter rooms.
I offer men my hand.
The horses that I used to groom
and failed to understand
have cousins here, and do the cats,
and nothing here looks strange.
But you have left, the light’s gone bad
And of what had been swell
Remain but shadows grey and sad.
Our Heaven’s gone to Hell.

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If I allude to things you know,
or you pretend I do,
which of us is more erudite
and which of us more false?

I whitter on how apples grow,
how Paris plucked and threw
some at a god or water sprite
and you remain awake,

you tell me, but your eyes are closed
and through the ‘evermores’
I’m raving on, I have supposed
from you I’m hearing snores.

Sculpting School

The sculptors chips off flakes of stone.
Dun bits fall in the sand.
The men and women, each alone,
are making something grand
and something small – the bits that fall
unnoticed on the ground.
I’m not embittered: bits enthrall
me how they lie around.
They will be here when sculptors go
home with grand things they've made.
The bits and I will be in rooms
or harried by a spade
or we will stack in cozy heaps
if blown up by strong wind.
We will remain – we’re here for keeps –
till class resumes again.

Mother Nature Calls

Her breath reeks of the sausage made from balls
and increases mental distance I desire
were physical. There is something of the stalls,
plowed fields, and fetid wet dog in the mire
her lungs pump through her mouth parts. I expire
a different way each time she leans my way.
Were they written I could hang on words she’ll say,
but they’re this way rote reminder of the rot.
She whispers how the rose’s perfect day
begins and ends as humans cold and hot.

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The wind rescinds the sentence of the clouds.
The sun comes out and puts the damp to rout.
I watch picnicking children by the stream,
and they and I in turn are watched by trout.

Where the water stirs itself evading rocks
by leaping without looking through the air
so many tiny rainbow-colored drops
split sunbeams so that we seem everywhere.

Then clouds return on other winds, and rain
occludes the children, trout and waterfall.
The church bell tolls it is that time again
and I turn homeward, letting footsteps fall

with little care upon the dark green grass
that sponges out my footsteps as I pass.

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This ruby moves: it is a bug.
That empty shotgun shell
Has served the bug as roof and rug.
I gauge it serves him well.
The bug wants  more. He goes outdoors,
flaps wings, flies to my book.
He says a sonnet only bores
a bug too small to look
across a large and well-filled page.
I give him praise and drink.
I tell him poems are all the rage.
‘That can’t be true. I think,’
he says. ‘A single shotgun shell
costs more than any ode.’
He bugged off then – it’s just as well.
I’d stepped on his abode.

Sophomoric Poetasters Rule OK

Tattooed upon his arm like ersatz armour
The sophomore wears punctuation rules
To help his cause: he wants to be a charmer
And knows his darling does not suffer fools
Although ‘not suffer fools’ is, just like ‘karma’
A term he is not sure of — uncut jewels
He hammers on in hopes they will impress
Her just enough, he hopes, that she’ll undress.

She’s poetic in the shower, in his dreams,
And so he studies poetry to broaden
The chance that he may favour her with reams
Of bumph that bumps along like lines of Auden
Do when he reads them. While his hot eyes gleam
And his glottal stops, this sophomore has sawed on
Until he’s hoarse. She laughs at this, of course,
But her laughter only serves to reinforce

His idea he is liked. He tries a sonnet
In the style of Keats, which he pronounces ‘Kate’s’
And dogs her steps with doggerel for her bonnet.
He writes swine for all her pearls. He sends her crates
Of poesy and puts a ribbon on it,
And tells her that her favourite poet Yeats
Would write like him, the amorous sophomore:
‘He would do, were ‘Yeet’s’ living anymore.’

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Like that vacuous bovine beast we call the cow
would do if wearing skates, she makes a mess
of every conversation:  Where one bow
suffices she feels pressured to confess
to crimes of which we knew of anyhow
and care of less. It is her earnestness
that sends me looking for a cattle car
to carry her to anywhere that’s far.

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The Sun King had us summoned from the dungeon,
and elevated from the oubliette.
The castle lord had wished that he could plunge on
and punish us for crimes he would forget,
but the Sun King had commanded.  I would lunge on
for freedom though wrongdoers’ druthers get
few pardons. I thank the king I am above ground
and hope for more next time he comes round.

Some days we (well, they – the painters and sculptors) were working in a castle, Château Chinon in Sermages. A place full of stories such as how Louis XIV decreed that from henceforth no prisoners could be kept below ground.

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I had a word with Guinevere who dressed
and went downstairs and welcomed Arthur home.
The Friar who absolved us Tuesdays blessed
for a ducat more the Duke of Alba’s gnome
plus the pious sheep a soldier had caressed.
My LSD convinced me I could roam
where bats could fly. One’s purple infant pressed
its china teeth on mine, and I awoke
a mile high in the ether on my toke.

Still at Château Chinon in Sermages

Grain All Fool All

How many women – blonde with youthful legs,
and silly hat and ice blue eyes – can dance
upon the rolling empty real-ale kegs
we breach and bung and burgle on the chance
one of them can attract and hold her glance?
I was thinking of the other one today.
I dreamed she’d stopped in bed with me to say –
ridiculously for we’ve not snogged  for years –
she’s attracted to me in the carnal way
that hops will fancy water; and corn, ears.

Still at Château Chinon in Sermages

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Of things I don’t expect to find, this bat –
its wings outspread, head up, tied to a tree –
takes pride of place . I find it startling that
a toy, plastic, purple bat would be
a product factories make and people buy.
It hugs the tree, assisted by the line
that family has for hanging clothes; they lie.
In fact, the castellans  are doing fine
continuing ancestral clan traditions.
They disembody peasants of their souls
and twist same in astounding good renditions
that look like plastic toys but are goals
or ghouls or gaols or girls – you take your pick
and pay and take them home. They make me sick.

Batting on at Château Chinon in Sermages

Sermages

As fast as wind a leaf blows by.
An ant and red bug intersect.
I watch the castle drawing nigh
as if it rode the wind and flecked
my view with half-remembered knights
and ladies, battles, hopes and blood.
It’s I who move, my walk takes flights
into the past. I step in mud
that chargers churned, and sheep now graze,
where lives were taken by swung swords.
Parisian ladies waited days
for tidings, but they feared the words
the clerics brought home. Honor’s one
that meant a husband won’t return.
Men razed the castle they had won
and wondered when it’d be their turn.
Red bugs learn nothing from mistakes.
The ant continues as ants do.
I seek a single trait that makes
us humans better, but they’re few.
I can’t find one of which I’m sure.
I ask the winds but they demure.

There I was batting on at Château Chinon in Sermages when the blonde Lady sidled up and said, ‘There was a battle here, razed the original castle to the ground. Thousands killed.’

I said, ‘Carry on’ and she  said, ‘Yes, lots,’ and left.

Then this poem came on like a red mist.

(It was a real battle. On one day, 20 July 1475 A.D., the men of Louis XI fought with the toops of Charles the Foolhardy. 2,000  were killed, 2,000 were taken prisoner. Details at

http://perso.orange.fr/sermages58/Sermages/hist.htm

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White sheep
Half-smart as lambs
Run gamboling whole days
On eating grass that nullifies
Their brains.

The force
And Energy
We get from eating grass
Is tiny and convinces me:
Eat sheep.

The lambs
Of lessor gods
Take options we’ll default
Our debts. We don’t, and they are our
Kabob.

Still (almost still) at Château Chinon in Sermages

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We lose ourselves in song, but song goes wrong
so often we, if rational, grow mute.
We learn song’s not required to muddle on
from babyhood to heart attacks acute
enough to stop us, wiser than Canute
who lost his subjects’ awe by bidding waves.
We might go dead anonymously, which saves
on eulogies, and euthanizes song.
The tide peaks out, and ebbs, and covered graves
greet sun with songs we’ve sung on all along.

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Early morning in the garden
No birds
Adorn the roof.
Competing flies fly off
And leave a pair of them to pair
Alone.

Perhaps,
I am not seen
By roses that I see
In yellows, reds, and gloriously
Their rose.

Which is
‘Piédestal’
And which the stone the steel
Will, when the sculptor works her will,
Support?

So high
Do swallows fly
Up in today’s blue sky
That nosebleeds must affect the bugs
They catch.

Une nature morte sur toile

There is something raffish  – not her walk, her hat –
that tells me she’s an artist in her mind.
She puts her easel up, speaks to the cat,
arranges half a lemon so the rind
is in the light just right. She stirs her paint.
An apple joins the lemon on the slice
of alabaster marble that a saint
of painting blessed, she thinks. She thinks it’s nice

to paint away the summers of her life.
It minimizes chances that her brushes
with other people like her lover’s wife
will damage her much more. She starts, and rushes,

spilling tears and paint until she’s out of breath
and marvels how her still life mirrors death.

Begun on town’s plaza in my office (back of Citroën Jumpy van), further worked on in garden, showed to painting instructor Luuk at coffee break.

Carriage Return Sonnet

Could I begin again I probably would,
but not today – it’s pleasant being here.
I need not help the mower though I could.
the chef gets on without the Chanticleer
my crowing could provide, and painters bring
results from half-filled palettes needing no
advice or strokes from me, and hammers ring
the news the sculptors would impart to grow
the graven from their granite. I enjoy
activity – when other people act.
I watch and breathe, delighting I employ
no conscious efforts except for the fact
I push across the paper my own pen
and, when a line ends, make that move again.

Le Rosbif  impenitente

The Frog remains content to beef and roast
me as a bloody foreigner although
I speak his language fluently and toast
his icons as if holy. We both know
our mutual amiability is show.
He speaks my language too, as taught in schools
we do not think are good – they’ve different rules.
We don’t share much: combativeness in sport,
suspicion that across La Manche live fools,
and a wish to conquer rather than import.

UK Tourist Bored

The French import the English wine
we natives here call tea
They swarm here for their holidays,
bathe in our balmy sea,
pronounce ‘t-h’ without a ‘th’
and bring along their cats
that they smuggle through the Chunnel
with their house-pet rabid bats.

But we forgive them everything
and give them for their cash
a bed-and-breakfast welcome
and cuisine: hot bangers, mash.
They’re crazy for Toad-in-a-Hole,
and beans on toast with jam.
They say to me, ‘Ami’, táis-toi,’
and blimy, yes I am.

Simple Sigh-Man

It does me good, not being phoned,
and knowing that you’re occupied.
I write on as if each word I honed
could be the magic one I’d ride
into a history where I’d win
Land Rovers using just my pen.

Hysterical is how you’d rate
my chance of staying celibate
in my Discovery: leather seats
and air-conditioning. Nothing beats
Descent Control, a decent wine,
rock music… Thanks, I’m doing fine.

The lunch bell rings, snaps me awake.
The artists stream from class and blink.
There is very little they can make
out of my chauffeur, or his wink
that makes my dream cars disappear
and leaves me sitting simply here.

Ministry

I am hearing music sent to me by email,
an URL of where the magic hides,
and the feeling I had lost inside the glacier
that I’d sculpted from the fear inside my head
comes flooding back, like jonquils grow in spring.

There are more colours in the shadows than just blood.
There are things of blazing beauty in here too.
The sun that set in silence after fading to the brown
of snake blood drying in the heated dust
is rising.  Life goes on, and life is good.

I had feared the world is ending, and it is.
But it’s been doing that for ages and the end
is out of sight for us who are alive.

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If societies improve by being mobile,
and the evidence exists they certainly do,
there is nothing to the silly, dim but noble
idea of treating those as equal who
have demonstrated they’re too dumb for words.
The illiterate by choice, and the drones,
do not deserve the schools that train up nerds.
There is little gained by teaching names of bones
and how our neurons’ patterns coalesce
to those who pine to be on television,
their claim to fame the faults that they confess.
Bright children should get status, not derision.
Give them the keys…
There is no point in moving upwards if there is nowhere to go.