Cathars

i.
She: August already. It is 9 in the evening and I pray –
please hold the light a little longer. The storm sounds the chimes
on the stairs as I clean wild mushrooms and a little butter sings
in the pan. A muscle pulls on the inside of my thigh like that one time

I thought that there might be a child. Something happens in my day.
I go to lock the door open and stand a minute where the water
has pooled. We spend our lives wanting to be covered.
A blanket, a lover’s body, the sea. The undiminished light.

At the village they call me “the pure one”,
like the 12th century heretics – so good, they put others to shame
and were no good but dead. Some centuries ago, he likes to say,

they might have broken their mirrors over me in the valley,
to see if my blood stained. But now it is I who hold myself away
because I see the little cracks in people, and tire easily.

ii.
He: She visits late in the day when I have brushed the pigment
off the table and light paints the edges of the room. In June,
she brought black locust flowers to fry in light batter;
we ate them with one bright yolk each, spilling on day-old bread.

I used to write, like she does, but now I model from the night sky:
a surface pointing to a depth without yielding any, answering
with old light our fear of nothing beyond. Really,
I make layers. After the paint has dried, I take a photograph

then paint again on that and repeat – I couldn’t
trust the paint. I tell her it will last thousands of years
without a crack, and all be worth my time. She says it’s inhuman

for things to last in that pure way – will it mean anything
if it never becomes a means for time’s
imprint, or mine, or something other than itself?

iii.
She: After each visit down the hill for a pound of grain,
I carry their weight on me back to the house, the men, women,
their pink children. For days, I sit like a week-old rose in a jar,
warm, my lemony scent turned sweet. Perfume,

more than other things, I always saw as moral.
I know you can’t be good if there’s no one to be good
to, but I prefer anything to their help. I’ve come to love
the clear sound of the grains when I drop them

now that my eyes are poor – how they smell
like nothing and slip like shame under the floorboards.
I like to write outside, watch the crows add themselves

to my frail birch like beads on cotton thread, or, come
autumn, see them shake its leaves free like difficult thoughts.
Sometimes, not always, I am so happy it can be hard to sleep.

iv.
He: The hills at least I trust. At the end of summer,
after the sheep from the village have gone,
they seem to hold all thought suspended in colour,
out of the reach of what is real, more like the smoke

of what has burnt below. The wind keeps the grass short
between us, like the carpet of a home
(I know she feels it too). Some days
I want to plunge arms-deep in my green pain,

but I’ve only wanted someone who feels and thinks
the way people in novels do. Like only she does,
my undiluted. Perhaps that’s where we both went wrong –

the world down there, it seems to go on well enough.
Hard peaches browning on windowsills; a child
scratching at the cracked wall, the birdsong of her pee.

v.
She: Still, I go to him sometimes, for a meal at the barn.
He used to say our poetry was like that trick we played
on our teachers at school – I’d stare above the right shoulder
and he the left, to make them doubt themselves.

I’d call him kind, thoughtful – my trick, because if I said so
he had to be. Those years his love for me grew like a tiny bird’s
terrified grip on my chest. I’d lift one of its rigid claws, knowing
this might break skin and something other enter my bloodstream.

But then I knew what I wanted – I wrote it on the ground for God to lap
with His great thirst. I called to him as he walked ahead to the top –
turn round. Later he’d said it wasn’t true about Camões,

drowning the girl to save the book. It hardly mattered much.
Mostly I let things be – I knew too well how it would end,
with longing moving you in his poem, not mine.

Camille Francois’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The North, Wild Court, Magma, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere

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