Santa Fe Poetry Broadside: Marguerite Bouvard, Mer de Glace

Issue #13, January, 2000 : -- -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9

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Marquerite Bouvard

Mer de Glace

We stood at the glacier's edge:
not a sea of ice,

but a stunned river
its gravelly roof studded with boulders.

Space caught us
in its wings, and the glacier's blue-green

chasms painted by algae.
Then they all crowded into the train

for the valley: Germans and Swedes, French
and Japanese. The pines blurring,

the clacking wheels lulled us
until an elderly man boasting

about his feats during the War,
addressed my husband in German. "I am French,
I lived through the Occupation,"

my husband flared. "I lived through
another kind of occupation,"

the man spat out as we plunged back
into our own histories.

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Issue #13, January, 2000 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.