Selected Poems by Jean Garrigue

Author:Jean Garrigue [Garrigue, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, General
ISBN: 9780252062247
Google: m4sXQnbHxZgC
Amazon: 0252062248
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1992-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Epitaph for My Cat

And now my pampered beast

Who hated to be wet,

The rain falls all night

And you are under it.

Who liked to be warm,

Are cold as any stone,

Who kept so clean and neat,

Cast down in the dirt

Of death’s filthy sport.

Pays Perdu

There are those days, vivid and pure,

When everything dazzles, new found.

It is on days like this that we understand Eden,

Old worlds of the Golden Hours.

What is it. It is vigor, freshness,

A sense of the flags of day flying free,

It is commodious harmony,

We have fallen into some deepest relation

With self, the sense, and the world,

We are at rest strenuously

For all has form, moves with vivacious fluidity.

Then—nothing that seems extraneous

From the voices of bells caught, parted and cast away

To the blazings of twenty butterflies

Bemused on a stalk of blue flowers.

As if we had composed the day

With the sleeping unseen at the back of the mind

And we neither faint nor pale.

‘When we are happy we have other names.’

So it was on that day in the country

When my friend and I at large in a town

Fortified on its rock above a green river

(A champing and nervous force that had cut

Whole landscapes in two in its glacier course)

Started out at the height of noon

On the broad footpath by the river

Past gardens of garlic and artichoke

And groves of olive established in tiers.

It was in Provence and by the Var

In a country of vineyards and lizards

And the fragrance of many rough herbs in bloom,

St. John’s Eve, almost, and yet not come,

The perfect summer essence of the year.

Now, as we were along the way

We stopped to talk to a passerby

Proud to dispense the lore of the country,

A stranger herself, who spoke of a village

Far down the way, by the river, and of another

Far up in the mountains, hard if not impossible to find,

From which donkeys came down twice a week,

There being no road but a donkey track

And this track its only link with the world.

She herself had seen neither one

But she liked to think of them lurking

At the end of some straggling path. So did we,

And following her vague suggestion

That the one called Lacs, up in the mountains,

Was somewhere down and then up, set out,

Larky and confident.

This much we knew, that in an old country

That holds many bones, where life has been hard,

Where much dust of the nightingales

Is mixed with the dust of poppies

And the stubborn roots of valerian, and all

The medicinal sages

That in an old country crossed by centuries of animals and men

There are many paths possible to take.

Foxes and dogs made them first,

Horses and donkeys succeeded.

Then the paths were secured, steps were cut out,

Walls were erected.

An old country is criss-crossed with paths,

Short cuts to the crest of a mountain.

Look at some track up the terraces

Where the olive trees doze

And you ought to know it is going somewhere.

We took one on some such faith.

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