Relais du Silence
When someone dies
in the Limousin region of France, they say
Il a laissé son écuelle, He has left his bowl, so a small
bowl is filled with Holy Water into which
an evergreen branch is dipped to bless
the body. After burial, they place the bowl
at the head of the tombstone: it can never
be used for anything else. My friend Jacqueline
says that some people insist
on a hierarchy of sorrows. If your
dog died after twenty years and my cat died
when I had lived with her for only three
months, who has the right to be
most sad?—which is like asking whose silence
is loudest: that of the blank sheet at the end
of Finnegans Wake or that of Joseph, who has not
one word recorded in the scriptures.
In Dawson City, the Klondike, cellulose nitrate
strips of silent film unspooled for years, waiting
for light, to tighten again around another reel.
Sometimes they would spontaneously
combust, burn down the theater
that held them, raging on even when
completely submerged in water. The French once
called their army la grande muette, the great
silent one, because they had to suffer
in silence, but in Dante’s Inferno, the damned
suffer according to the principle of contrapasso
like the man in Missouri who killed
hundreds of deer and was sent to prison,
sentenced to watch, each week, the film
Bambi. Let us observe a moment of silence
and then book a room in the hotel
Relais du Silence, where we can engage
in Perpetual Adoration: human
trances, human nectars, ensuant
charm, a transhuman surname
chant. On the wall of the cave
painted twenty thousand years ago
in Font-de-Gaume, a reindeer nuzzles the flank
of stone. In the fresco above the sanctuary of
San Damiano below Assisi, after the cross speaks
to St. Francis, St. Luke the Evangelist pours words
into the head of a smiling ox.
Lost Again, Monte Perdido, Mont Perdu, Wherever
you’re off to now, a single-strand pikake lei
swaying between breasts: Aloha! Just pretend
it’s the transhumance, sheep threading their way
up your jagged crest in their grey woolly-rag
lollygag as if they were the basting stitch
of a god trying to figure out how to hold
everything together. The sheep, called brebis
on the French side of the border, pick their way
among stones littered along the peak where
someone must have emptied their pockets as if
it were a vide-poche tray, as if the sheep crept
in some trans-human trance across Germany
and Europe where the living step around to avoid
walking on the 40,000 permanent brass markers
embedded in the pavement: stolpersteine, stumbling
stones that announce where someone who was
murdered in the Holocaust once lived. When the sheep
look up, a bit of clipped grass remains
on each one’s lip.
Pas Encore
The late summer grasses say
not yet, which is never
the same as nyet, just as
Galileo, after being forced to
recant his claim that the Earth moves
around the sun, murmured
E pur si muove, and yet
it moves. Even the name of
your perfume, like the late summer
grasses, says not yet, but it’s the smallest
island on the Seine that’s named
Paradise, and at the almost end
of your breast is the only pink
I can find in this late fall.
Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, most recently Parole (Oberlin College Press, 2018). Her previous book, Enchantée (Oberlin, 2013), won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poets, and Tryst (Oberlin, 2009), was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Chez Nous (Oberlin) was published in 2005, and her second book, VoiceOver (Oberlin, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A collection of essays devoted to Estes’s work appears in the University of Michigan Press "Under Discussion" series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry (2019).