Sport 32: Summer 2004
Stephanie de Montalk
Stephanie de Montalk
His Warmth As Always
He has gone home,
rented a cottage
on a collective farm
with a barn attached
for warmth in winter,
and a clean river,
only a bus ride from the city.
He has two kitchen gardens,
five pigs,
two cows,
fifteen chickens,
one rooster,
six rabbits (small ones)
and two big ones (male and female)
four hundred metres square,
according to the official description;
but he still remembers
the cedar
he left behind
as a sapling
on the bank
where his cat
curled like a punga frond,
lay as long
as an agapanthus petal
and was buried
beside a daphne bush,
white, in memoriam.
A card arrives
from the snow,
a photograph of his cows
Marta and Boria,
and six wooden goblets,
painted, on a circular tray:
all gold leaves
and colourful fruits of the forest,
including strawberries.
‘Open champagne,’
the card seems to say.
‘Pour it out.
There is no harm in joy.
Be amongst good friends.’
‘Just think,’ he writes,
‘spring is almost here.
More sun, more blooms
and the cedar even higher.
I now have thirty-six chickens
and, each day, thirty-six eggs.
I am ready for summer.’
He loved the red-tinged cedar—
the tree that shaded
his parents
as they toiled
for their children
and, in early autumn,
as they gathered mushrooms
in the soft grass.
He will plant another.
He will light his fire
with its cones.
He will bottle
its aromatic oil
and send it by fast post
to protect us,
very soon.
Artefact Incognito
Sandstone or steel,
the gallery cannot display you.
It would need to
strengthen the floor
and reconfigure the ceiling.
Explain why you are no
tailor's dummy
or cinematic prop.
Clothe you.
Anticipate your sudden wish
to return to base
on a public holiday,
when the articulated lorry
and flashing lights
are not available.
Who cares?
You weren't wrenched
from a desert dune
for finger nibbling.
Try higher ground,
alpine flowers,
your head and shoulders
above the mist,
above the wind
blown macrocapa
and dutiful pine,
paws in the soil,
tawny limbs flexed,
magnificent chest mobile,
because every breath counts,
heart or no heart.
Appointed Limits
Uncle Donald, becalmed
in the Lesser Antilles
will tell his nephews
a story in which nothing
much happens beyond
discussion of a trip
from New Orleans to St Louis
by steam boat which once took
three weeks and was recently
accomplished in three days,
and the possibility of the ship
as floating home with
balustrades and ornamentation
befitting a palace.
One day there were clouds
like birds on the horizon,
the next a shoe, a couple of shoes
then a cobbler and so on
which, together with
volcanic rocks to port,
and starboard, and port again,
and the occasional expedition
to shore to buy tobacco from farmers
and booty from smugglers,
should help pass the hour
pleasantly enough.
He'll forgo the storm
when he clung to the mast
with the legs of a horse,
swallowing water,
and the moment of near sinking
when the bosun promised
omelets for breakfast,
and the captain,
straddling the bridge,
held his telescope like a rifle.