PoetryMagazine.com Since 1996 Volume XXIII Lynne Knight Lynne Knight has published six poetry collections and five chapbooks. Her awards include a Poetry Society of America award, a RATTLE Poetry Prize, and an NEA grant. I Know (Je sais), her translation with Ito Naga of his Je sais, appeared in 2013 from Sixteen Rivers Press. In March of 2018, she became a permanent resident of Canada, where she lives on Vancouver Island.
The Maubert Market When I went to the Maubert
market with my string bag &
rehearsed phrases, I looked at Provençal
tablecloths, yellow rich as sunflowers
splashed with olives black like the
sea at night,
but I didn’t know if it was
authentic Provençal or a cheap
rip-off. My instincts said rip-off,
but what was the French word for
rip-off? This happened before you could
look up a word on your phone, so I smiled &
said nothing, moving on to the
scarves, where a man who resembled my
father stood, bored, & when I touched the
first one, he leaned close to tell me
in English that it was fine quality. I
said I preferred to speak French, having come
to Paris to practice.
Practice away, he said, still in English, & I was back on
the sofa
with the slide rule in hand,
my father telling me it was easy,
easy, any fool could do logarithms if she
put her mind to it, & my speechlessness
then was my speechlessness now,
so without buying anything, not the
scarf or the lettuce or fig bread & cheese I’d
come for & that I did know how to ask
for, I slunk back to the flat on
the Île St Louis where I made tea, speaking
all the French words I could muster,
shaking them out like a tablecloth, like wet
lettuce, biting into them like bread
& cheese.
Traveling after a Death That night in Venice, as
darkness seeped into the water, the
two women hired a gondola. The oarsman
dipped quickly until they slipped away from
the Grand Canal. Then he slowed, following
the watery labyrinth. Ghostly shadows rose from old stone walls. The
oarsman sang at first but then stayed silent, as
the two of them were silent: only the plash of the
dipping, the roll of water closing behind the hull. There are moments so
beautiful the body has no means to
contain them. What did it matter that
they, too, would die? The night was theirs, was no
one’s, the boat moving so quietly it seemed
not there.
The Origin of the Phenomenon Every year, when the cherry
trees bloomed, a bird began to sing deep in
their branches. The villagers woke hearing
the song and ran outside to see the bird, but no
matter where they went among the trees, they could
never spot it. It sang like the wind sometimes, and
sometimes like water rushing over rocks. A
beautiful song, but strange for a bird, not the high
melodic notes of usual, just wind and water.
Sometimes wind through pines although the pines were too
far on the mountains to hear; sometimes the water
of a wide river though the nearest river was
a day’s long walk. By now the trees were dense
with blossom, little silk parasols, and the days so
warm that the villagers often lay down to sleep in
their shade. The bird kept quiet then, but when
the villagers woke, there it was, singing wind, singing water.
What kind of bird is this? they asked every traveler,
but no one could say. Then the blossoms drifted to
the ground, soft snow of late spring, and the
villagers took to their fields, forgetting the bird,
forgetting their need to know if they were dreaming, if
the quiet days were real.
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