Peter Dale Scott

from:
MOSAIC OF ORPHEUS: Five Canadian Poems

OCCITANIAN SPRING

to Susan Burgess Shenstone

A half-century of silence
and now thanks to a friend’s email
I can write to you for the first time

about our bicycle trip together
after that freezing winter in Paris
when my new friend P went insane
and I myself my socialist
faith having foundered
in the intrigues of post-war Europe
between the Communist graffiti
and chars blindés in the boulevards                      tanks
was reading the letters of Van Gogh
waiting as I thought for my own 
inevitable madness to kick in

when two Americans proposed a tour
of the churches in southern France
I was ambivalent from guilt
at my many absences from Sciences Po
and you who had just gotten engaged
only joined reluctantly 
because Chuck and Lute would be there
as necessary chaperones 

We bicycled from Périgueux’s
cathedral so restored
a century earlier by Viollet-le-Duc
it looked like a railway station
to the cave of Lascaux
opened just three weeks before
where we all stood in darkness
until the tour-guide lit his match
so that we too could discern
the galloping silent bison
hidden away in this cave
for twenty thousand years

It was thus our eyes opened 
to the art of the Middle Ages
Beaulieu where the angels danced
above the opened coffins of the dead
the basilica at Conques
crammed into a small canyon
we looked across as the dawn sun 
came down the opposite hill 
through blossoming almond and crocus
to where they opened for us the crypt 
of the tenth century gold virgin
whose stiff imploring arms were 
for better or worse encrusted
with Roman cameos and gems

We biked unwittingly down
the same narrow roads where
Eliot and Pound had walked together
only thirty years before us
the wave pattern cut in the stone	         Cantos 29/145
to Albi’s fortress cathedral
austere outside sumptuous within
memorializing the struggle
of the church against the Cathars
in an inscribed world of saints 
heretics suppressed cultures
and sublimated adoration
I had never conceived of 
in my Protestant corner of Quebec

And then disaster – the missed
rendez-vous at evening
with our chaperones simply gone
us panicked at being alone
and you red-eyed insisting
we must return at once to Paris
but there were no good connections

so we didn’t We took a bus
up up to the high bare
causses of the Massif Central
with crags like agonized dolmens
barely sheltering the sheep
and down to the warm paradise
of Lodève and Montpellier
for me at least an entrance 
into a new and menacingly
fragrant Mediterranean world
of flamingos landing in the Camargue



the courses de taureaux 
in the Roman arena at Arles
the ruined abbey at Montmajour
we explored alone at sunset
whose stairwell I descended into darkness
step by step until suddenly
there was nothing more to step on

All my life I have tried
to recover this. Next spring
I at La Pierre Qui Vire                               Burgundian monastery
walked among jonquils once again
After that with my first wife 
I hitch-hiked through the Dordogne
en route to Bosnia
Finally with my second wife
I toured Provence in a rental Lancia
It could not be the same

as that first awkward trip
with fumes of diesel and cherry
over wet tarmac
or crushed thyme on the hillside
and the hot breath of the mistral
in our face as we struggled back north
(towards the broken bridge at Avignon
and the inevitable train station
back to our Canadian lives)
pedaling by the columns
of a restored Roman city
and the very olive groves which
unbeknownst to us
Van Gogh had painted
from the small nearby asylum

When you left I was still 
as inhibited as when we began
We never even kissed good-bye
nor did I receive any hint
if your heart had melted
like mine and Bernart’s  	                      B. de Ventadorn
at the faint falling cadences
of the skylark tumbling overhead
after the sunny rainburst
still heard after decades
of teaching Bernart here out west
Can vei la lauzeta mover
When I see the skylark beat 
With joy its wings against the sun
Till he forgets to fly, and falls
From the sheer sweetness in his heart
Ah! what envy I have then
Of those whom I see rejoicing
I marvel, that from desire
My heart does not melt at once

as I a self-made medievalist
came slowly to realize
I had not been ready at twenty-one
for the deepest mysteries in life
but was blessed to have suffered
intense Petrarcan yearning
with pains I cannot now conceive of
to open my eyes and heart
in that miserable first year
of my supposed adulthood
and disengagement from my private past
I would not now change
for anything in the world.


                 Renvoi

  From Susan Burgess Shenstone

And then your email reply: 
we had stopped for a rest 
above the side of the road. 
with the hills behind us, hills 
which had sheep grazing
it was after we had missed the train

and we heard this sweet haunting voice singing 
Il y a des moutons blancs
Belle rose du printemps
Nor could we see anyone near us 
It just seemed to float down from the hills 
as the day was ending. 
It was quite magical. 

I remember only				
that I sang it afterwards for years		
on the road by myself --			
Belle rose du printemps. 
                                          
                                 1950, 2007