Waking Bodies

Normandy Redivivus

44 Normandy Redivivus I always meant to go back, to loll in salty maritime Museums sailed through on my inaugural voyage, To socialize with the local Communists, who have time To spare, to collect the rewards a boy aged Thirty promised the man who returned him home, Which was how it felt, then. Even my marriage, Terminal, released doses of sweetness, like les pommes Of Calvados and Gourel, into the bloodstream. Even my broken French healed, churning the foam Of sympathy. Oh squandered days! A stream Of scribbled notes drafted in hot fury And never played. My closed eyes form a seam About to burst: a scene in which a cherry Wood writing table opposite a fire Is magnetic north spreads out from the presbytery Where we lived, across the barbed wire That shielded God’s half-acre from our Parisian Neighbors’, and over potato fields and a briar Heath to the castle at Arques and its moat of horizon. I haunted there, cocksure as Hansel, the ghost Of a chance, spirit of the chase, racing Over the greatest possible ground; my heart embossed With invitations and answers, full beyond reason . . . My future, found, had been ordered, and at no cost 45 To me, to be held under my name (crossed Out now) until I washed ashore on my native coast: A shell, into which a new life crawled, almost. This page intentionally left blank. ...