Ann Fisher-Wirth
La Garde Guérin
Traveling with friends in the south of France.
The first few days, the facts enchant me:
Three feet thick, the walls of this hotel
kept enemies at bay, for the knights called pariers
built strong, banding together for peace
and promising safe passage to the jongleurs,
marchands, pelerins—three great types
of medieval travelers. Once, the village thrived
with the ancient occupations—cartmaker,
dairy worker, pig butcher, wool spinner.
Plowman with horses, plowman with oxen.
Wood chopper, farrier, keeper of rabbits.
But the peasants left the hard life of the mountains.
Now the tourists come, it’s Un Grand Village.
And we come too, with hiking boots and daypacks,
to taste the chestnut honey, climb the local footpaths.
Our children grown, we think that all back home
is well. Each night we drink un verre
among the red geraniums
where swallows dart and swoop among the shadows.
*
Sunlight passes from one tawny window
to the other, to the right and left of this stone altar,
lighting up the floor in quiet circles—
it is poor, this Romanesque chapel, its narrow
leaded windows set in granite
that has weathered for a thousand years.
Since the moment the phone call came from home,
fear has pulled me back to light more votives,
more votives, place them in the bank of votives—
I have become any woman, any century, lighting candles for her son—
But one night I leave the village on the rock and heather path
toward Le Mont, and double over suddenly
screaming and wailing beneath the faint stars, to know
how many have begged to God to help the children they loved,
and the heavens answered nothing, and still this suffering continues—
*
Someone approaches behind me on the pitch-black trail,
wraps strong arms around me and won’t let go.
I do not even know whose arms they are—my husband’s?
Our friend’s? His French wife’s? —Yes, she who knows me least
knows what to do. She hangs on and rocks me,
glues herself to my back. Her arms like those parier walls enclose me.
He’s young, she says, he’s young… he’ll work his journey out….
Thirty Years After I Left Your Father
Green Gulch Zen Monastery Gardens
Why should, how could, your bitterness with me
ever completely fade?
We move through fields of lettuce
into quietness between us
toward the shrine with its Buddha,
the enclosure near the sea—
two human creatures
among the trees, nothing but that simple thing.
These mysterious beings called “I,”
and “walk,” what is that, a way of moving forward.
Bio
Ann Fisher-Wirth's fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, will be published by Wings Press in 2012. She is coediting Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, which Trinity University Press will publish in 2012. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, online, and in anthologies. She has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She teaches poetry and American literature at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the Minor in Environmental Studies, and in the Low Residency MFA at Chatham University, Pittsburgh. She also teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS.