Pas De L'Incise

We came down from the little mountains
once every few weeks
for a sack of rice, or lard, or candles,
or just to talk for a moment
with the old man in the paperbag hat
who lounged at the door with a fly whisk.

We would complain about each other:
he's bitter, he wants so much,
what she has she doesn't want:
and we'd brag of the harshness
of that plateau, the splendor
of Andromeda, the absolute silence.

Sometimes we boasted
of the waterfall, the whirlwinds,
the downy soft-pinioned owl
drifting in daylight
with a hole in his voice,
the immense cliffs —

and that is all anyone knows
of those years of marriage,
labor, voluntary poverty:
those mountains were perfectly flat
and exist only as a little rip
where the map was folded once too often.

Copyright © 2005 D. Nurske All rights reserved
from The Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission