Triple Entendre
I. On the back of the map to Veckring.
Spring is not the time for writing.
Writing is for darkness and cold.
When the mind is trapped doubly indoors.
Spring is for release.
Thoughts set to roam freely and dissipate,
As the car winds through German towns,
or the train through the rolling hills of Lorraine.
Beautiful, but hardly worth the butchery they put each other through.
Cast out the thoughts over the endless hectares of green
cows and yellow flowers,
Brother tells me they are for making canola oil.
and placid canals lined with rows of straight trees,
Brother tells me is was the Sun King’s idea, Louis XIV, to show man’s dominion over nature.
Good having one so informed along for the ride.
So the throughts of the year are wrung out,
squeezed from the mind like water from a soggy water-logged sponge,
heavy with too much.
Ex(s)punged.
To float like wind or the rustle of the train into the sweet abandonment of spring in France.
Printemps. Premiere. First. Beginning.
Lonely thoughts of home.
A place that is increasingly only a place that I ever see in passing.
A year.
A final death of childish things.
of boyhood.
the mantle awaits.
strong and solitary.
The tired loves and hardships all Past. And friends are dying. Two in a month.
For land so barren and wartorn even the inhabitants are pessimistic about it,
while we sit on this sunny train and clatter north.
Strasbourg. Sarrebourg, Remily, Metz, Thionville.
on a loose schedule without worry,
and the thought arises,
Camus-like, and thus fitting, being in France,
that none of it matters, nothing matters,
in the Life,
save what we choose to create and do and love.
Meaning from within.
These fields will be turned and brown,
and snow covered and green again and will not note our passing,
And we will be lonely, apart, hurt and grieving,
Together, in love, happy and home again,
and Time will not note our passing.
Louis had it wrong.
No matter how we till the earth,
or shape the land,
plant the trees,
plot the course,
Nature retains dominion. Spring is come. Winter is coming.
Do what you will, while you can, the rest is death and haze over the yellow fields between Mecleuves and Laquenexy.
Real, ethereal, and gone beyond the horizon before these words have finished.
You will never see it again as I did. Nor will I.
II. On the platform at Metz
I thought of you,
Not with love, since that is not for me for a long time yet,
but with kindest affections,
and I hoped your uncle was doing better in that hospital,
and that all would be well,
even if it wouldn’t.
And I remembered how nice the olive groves were on that long, hot walk up the Cinque Terre,
and how you have changed me for the better in these few short months.
III. Directly, from the sunlight through my shades in Uppsala
Josh was gone, for good this time
and after four days of starvation, vomiting, diarrhea, and brutal excercise
I’d made it back to Uppsala and slept like a corpse in the same position for half the night, sans pillow, sans movement, sans hope, pale and thin and sickly. Shriveled, having split rations with Josh as he vomited midday, and hugged him like a child to keep him warm through the long, cold night in the bunker.
But the concrete floor was replaced with a bed and aching joints could feel the springs and did not care and the mind shut off like a TV set and let all of the hard year pour out as though all the levies had been mined at once and the flood would restore life to the Earth.
You don’t look well, she said, I’ve never seen you look like this.
I am not well, I said, but I’ll get better.
and I slept.
And in the morning, with the sun warming the green tree outside the window and the sky blue for miles, in the morning it was past. The deaths and the loneliness and the sickness, and I was stiff, as one must be who sleeps as a corpse, neither turning nor stretching, but I was well.
You look different, she said, much better than last night.
I know, I said, I am better.
You need to go home and eat vitamins, she said.
Yes, mother, I said.
DO IT! she said.
A year down. A year to go, with the hard parts all done.
and what comes after?
Whether its expatriation or a flight home is no matter.
Now it is summer, and wondrous, and full of life.
Like Lazarus he arose, and walked home by way of the fruit stand.
