Ma mere L’Oye

Jen Crawford

Here we hunt for shady corners; there is no fire at the Mallarmés’, and Ravel is working. The big flies are humming. The dragonflies have thrived. They look like winged sausages.
—Maurice Ravel to Ida Godebska in Madrid, from Valvins, September 18th, 1908.

Finding a lilac slowness. That you’ll grow out of this but stay. And as a tendril comes around fingers to the palm. To open a field for sunlight. Petals dry. The parachute opens too, into its floating. Your shoulders touch her remembrance. That little turn, dégagé:

Once we were anchored in the warm bed, the cool bed of swaying glass, where the pickerel kiss and leave. Their flanks become weeds. They speak each current, and disappear.

We learnt this with the governess. Up the stairs in a chalk stroke, like a clock sounding out the shades of a face. Brow and temple. Lip and cheekbone. She keeps sticks of morning in her lovely moon jacket, in its pocket. And they’re stolen to the window, where shutters dream an opening clatter, and the windmill unthreshes miles of light.

This will never be such a long way from here. Across the air, back across matchwood hours to our home. Where the suet stays certainly cool, though the loom of the day pours out hill upon hill.

Jen Crawford is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks, including 2016’s Koel (Cordite Books). She teaches poetry and creative writing within the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, Australia, and has also taught in Singapore and Aotearoa/New Zealand. She was raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Philippines and holds a PhD from the University of Wollongong.