August First: it was a year ago

we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert

to open the house in St. Guiraud

rented unseen.  I'd stay; you'd go; that's where

our paths diverged.  I'd settle down to work,

you'd start the next month of your Wanderjahr.

I turned the iron key in the rusted lock

(it came, like a detective-story clue,

in a manila envelope, postmarked

elsewhere, unmarked otherwise) while you

stood behind me in the midday heat.

Somnolent shudders marked our progress.  Two

horses grazed on a roof across the street.

You didn't believe me until you turned around.

They were both old, one mottled gray, one white.

Past the kitchen's russet dark, we found

bookshelves on both sides of the fireplace:

Verlaine, L'Étranger, Notes from the Underground.

Through an archway, a fresh-plastered staircase

led steeply upward.  In a white room stood

a white-clad brass bed. Sunlight in your face

came from the tree-filled window.  "You did good."

We laid crisp sheets we would inaugurate

that night, rescued from the grenier a wood-

en table we put under the window.  Date 

our homes from that one, to which you returned

the last week of August, on a late

bus, in shorts, like a crew-cut, sunburned

bidasse.  Sunburned, in shorts, a new haircut,

with Auden and a racing pulse I'd earned

by "not being sentimental about 

you,"  I sprinted to "La Populaire."

You walked into my arms when you got out.

At a two minute bus stop, who would care?

"La Populaire" puffed onward to Millau

while we hiked up to the hiatus where

we'd left ourselves when you left St. Guiraud

after an unambiguous decade

of friendship, and some months of something new.

A long week before either of us said

a compromising word acknowledging

what happened every night in the brass bed

and every bird-heralded blue morning

was something we could claim and keep and use;

was, like the house, a place where we could bring

our road-worn, weary selves.

  Now, we've a pause

in a year we wouldn't have wagered on.

Dusk climbs the tiled roof opposite; the blue's

still sun-soaked; it's a week now since you've gone

to be a daughter in the capital.

(I came north with you as far as Beaune.)

I cook things you don't like.  Sometimes I fall

asleep, book open, one A.M., sometimes

I long for you all night in Provencal

or langue d'oc, or wish I could, when I'm 

too much awake.  My early walk, my late

walk mark the day's measures like rhyme.

(There's nothing I hate---perhaps I hate

the adipose deposits on my thighs

---as much as having to stay put and wait!)

Although a day alone cuts tight or lies

too limp sometimes, I know what I didn't know

a year ago, that makes it the right size:

owned certainty; perpetual surprise.