Women of the Plain

From the French.  

   nuns with fat red 
cheeks, fat calves, fat 
bottoms go on Sundays to visit 
the winemaker uncle and eat plum pies. 
It's blue from the mountain peaks 
down to the low hills' base. But all that's on 
the mountain where we 
plainsfolk sometimes see from a distance 
a joyous window glitter in a moment's sunshine. 
The plain is something else. Among the rushes, 
among the reeds glide in a long black and 
silver thread glide the dormant waters 
the deep waters where sometimes a servant 
girl drowns herself because she didn't marry the 
miller's or the mayor's or the marshal's son, 
glide the dormant waters beneath 
the heat of equatorial July 
and the stork on spread wings 
soars over a half-league of fields 
in vain, everything is dry. 
The tree frogs are curled up 
under the leaves. But the waters 
glide deep and inhabited 
by carp, pike, by 
ghosts, illusions. 
You who watch standing on the shore 
and unweaponed see them pass 
silently, see the buzzard circle, 
and the baby rabbit, you who watch the black water 
for what then do you hope? 


      Odile, pray for us, women of the plain 
and especially for those who were once 
daughters of a certain lineage, bringing 
as dowry vineyards, hunting grounds, good rows 
of hops, of beets, of tobacco, 
good businesses—good cash registers 
of good butcher shops, bakeries, jewelers' shops, 
and now there are many pharmacists' wives, 
tax-collectors' wives, wives of the district judges 
and of the doctor who does his 100 kilometers 
daily in two rounds of visits, pharmacists' wives, 
notaries' wives, wives of the mill owner 
and the miller and the wine exporter. 
Odile, think of our long days 
on the plain's horizon high 
and visible from a long way off to the child 
on a bicycle coming back from middle school, the pine tree 
that moans on winter nights with a 
human voice. Once a month 
the seamstress comes for a day's work in the 
big storeroom and one evening the child 
had the start of a fever and that night 
woke up moaning. Alas, we 
saved him, alas we saved him for the 
Siberian camps, the meat hooks 
of Bavarian butchers, the bullets 
in the Vietnamese jungle or the Kabyle mountains. 


      on Sunday we go out 
for a stroll beyond the train station 
in light-colored dresses, shoes whitened 
with chalk, we'd meet 
the pharmacist's wife. 
On Palm Sunday, the day 
of the tents, the kids, sent to the 
Jewish baker, brought back stacks 
of unleavened bread. 
Alas day without yeast. Where has 
our youth gone and the album where 
we copied poems by 
Lamartine (Alphonse de) of the so 
beautiful name so French so 
elegant 
days without yeast. And in the deepest 
dormant waters grows so slowly 
but surely the tumor which in twenty years 
will kill.