Well, the book that Alison mentioned
called The Vixen, which is the last published
book, the form of the poems--
they're all-- all the poems are the same form in--
they're not the same length, but the lines work the same way--
and they're all about the same place,
which is Southwest France, not at the same particular time.
They move around in time.
They also seem to move around in the book
because I can never find the one I'm looking for, but--
well, it seems to have-- oh, here we are.
It's called "Present."
If any of you-- there was a book that I was encouraged to read
and did when I was in college.
It was a very important work in the beginning of, what was
the age of criticism, alas, but written by an English,
English poet and critic, William Empson,
called the Seven Types of Ambiguity,
and he talked about the way English uses ambiguity in a way
that most of the Romance languages really don't.
So it's beautiful in that, but the-- one of the great glories
of English, this mess of a language that we all inherited,
which is a great gift to have--
I mean, I sometimes wake up thinking, oh, my god,
how wonderful not to have been born a poet with French
as one's native language, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I love, I love, I love France.
I love French.
I love French poetry very much, but what a language
to have to deal with.
And, and of course, the poem is just
sort of a dreadful idea in France.
I mean it's amazing you made a mistake, I mean,
which do you mean?
But Shakespeare knew that this wasn't
the way it happened that you meant everything at once.
And the French really knew this, too,
until the beginning of the 17th century,
and then they decided to unlearn it.
But this-- all these poems are set in the Southwest of France
that was very important, where I lived
a good bit of my life, my earlier life, a region that's
changed quite a lot since then.
"Present"
"She informed me that she had a tree of mirabelles,
told me it was the only one anywhere around.
She did not want everyone to realize she had it.
It might go for years and bear nothing
at all, flowering with the other plums, but then nothing.
And another year, it would be covered with mirabelles.
You know they are not so big as all the others,
but they are more delicate, for those acquainted with them.
She promised me mirabelles if it was the year for them.
She lived in a house so small she
must have been able to reach anything from where she was,
and her garden was scarcely larger.
She grew corn salad in winter after Brussels sprouts.
Well, it was a cold garden, facing north,
so it was slow in spring, better for summer.
One of the knotted, gray trees leaning against the wall
to the south was the mirabelle.
A snow of plum blossoms swept across the valley
in the morning sunlight of a day in March
and moved up the slope, hour by hour.
She told me later, she thought it
would be a year of mirabelles, unless it froze.
When she bent in her garden, she disappeared in the rose.
It took her a long time to stand up,
to turn around, let herself through the gate, the walk,
to do anything.
At my age, I have all I need if I keep warm, she said.
Late one day that summer, she appeared
at the wall carrying a brown paper bag, wet at the bottom.
The mirabelles, she whispered, but she would not come in.
We sat on the wall and opened the bag.
Look, she said, how you can see through them, and each of us
held up a small, golden plum, filled with the summer evening."