The Far Away House

We must have thought we looked
responsible, freezing
in front of the green porch
of the ramshackle house
with the ominously sagging roof
we'd bought in our foolishness,
my beard just beginning to whiten,
your corkscrew ringlets still
gold-brown. We looked so proud
and oblivious, like new settlers.

We'd hired an honest carpenter.
It was almost winter
and the wind off the bay
was severe, inhospitable,
and made summer seem
theoretical. Did we look ahead
through the frozen rooms
to the kitchen we didn't yet have
to see this photo of ourselves
still on the refrigerator
among unimaginable grandchildren?—
it's their house now too, the one
they call the "the far away house."

To the parents that we were,
in the photo the carpenter took,
stuck now to the refrigerator
by a magnet shaped like a fish
and another like a daisy:
hats off to your faith.
That June we painted
every surface, our clothes
so spattered we threw them away,

and made a place destined
for our family forever—
that is, if you think of a house
as a state of feeling, the lilt
of wind off the ocean
through the gauzy curtains
before the grownups are awake.

Alan in France

I am not a young American chemical engineer living in Paris
(though Lesson One teaches me to say that).
I'm a retired American living in Aix-en-Provence
where all the little shops play American songs.
(America, my country, where they misconstrue liberty
to mean extra-low taxes for hedge fund managers.)

My wife makes vividly colored paintings, often of France,
of old stone villages with arches, with flowers.
And Camus' molecules are in the tassels of grass
I carry in my wallet—Camus who described the lives
of the silent poor. How can I not love France?

I like to go to concerts in old churches and cry.
That's me, with the white-gray beard, looking somewhat rabbinic.
My country seems to need to punish the poor.
I like to see hunger managed. Desperation managed.
And the heat of the world managed, the way here
the trees are sublimely managed along the roadside.

Let's say music is as close as we get to heaven.
Though I play French horn and blockflöte (neither well),
I'll never get to heaven, I fear. Only France.
France whose grapes weigh more than all the guns in my country,
if we count all those gnarled ancient vines still uttering leaves.
France that pays young women to have babies.
France that sends its dispirited unemployed to spas.

When I was a child it took seven whole days
to reach here in a ship twenty blocks long.
The war was just over. People were missing legs.
But where else could the joys of peace be better celebrated?

Sixty years later, today, on the Cours Mirabeau,
they think it's time to couper the giant plane trees
like so many asparagus in a garden.
And that fellow, in the bleached, abundant, shadeless sunlight,
in front of the monumental fountain
symbolizing rivers tamed, canalized, and pure—
that one is me. Or rather, me in France.