THE SERVANT
(La
Servante)
MyoId nurse and servant, whose seasoned heart
made you jealous,
is
dead and sleeps apart
from us. Shouldn't we bring her a few flowers?
The dead, the poor dead, they have their bad hours,
and when October, stripper of old trees,
poisons the turf and makes their marble freeze,
surely they find us worse than wolves or curs
for sleeping under mountainous warm furs. . .
These, eaten by the earth's black dream, lie dead,
without a wife or friend to warm their bed,
old skeletons sunk like shrubs in burlap bags.
They feel the ages trickle through their rags,
and have no heirs or relatives to chase
with children round their crosses and replace
the potted refuse, where they lie beneath
their final flower, the interment wreath.
The oak log sings and sputters in my chamber,
and in the cold blue half-light of December,
I
see her tiptoe through my room and halt
humbly, as
if
she'd hurried from her vault
with blankets for the child her sleepless eye
had coaxed and mothered to maturity.
What can
I
say to her to calm her fears?
My nurse's hollow sockets fill with tears.
