LADY ASHLEY'S DREAM
[Memories of the Great War, 1914-1918]
i.
Upon a faerie swing
Whose arch inscribed
A hemisphere behind the rail
She listened to Ravel
And thought of Debussy
And Monet and Pissaro
And all her noble kinsmen.
She wondered if
The haze of life were gone,
The prism of detail,
Nature's cool finesse across the mind.
On a shady street in old Saint Louis
She swung to weightlessness
[Like a cultured, proper astronaut
Who deftly held her flying skirt
So no one dare to peek
Upon her stratified array
Of undergarments]
She swung to weightlessness
And in her time machine
She sank into the archways of remembrance,
Was back again along the Seine,
The shops, the strolls, the vista,
When the finest trace of light and wind
Would jar the mental web,
And she was envied for
Her quality of tremble.
ii
Of late the New World
Bombarded her poor brain
With harsh impressions,
Caused pangs of guilt
To question
All the tissue of remembrance,
To wonder if the redness
Of the poppies
[Not garish red but painter's red built up
With variegated brush
Of consciousness]
To wonder if the men
Who ruled the night
But fifteen blocks away,
Who robbed and killed and even raped
To get their toxic thrills
Of heroin and coke,
If they wrenched all precious colors
From the scene
And left it now one bloody and vermillion red.
Sometimes she also wondered
If the real smoke and clash
Of factories
And locomotives
Belied the hazy ambiance
Of her kinsmen's urban art.
Occasionally to calm her nerves
She took an extra sleeping pill.
iii
"And what keeps time?"
The sun had blown the clarion
of pastel.
The flats all pasteboard joy
Across the river.
"And what keeps time?"
Her pupil, velvet in his cords,
Lounged immodest on her parachute hems.
"Le Monstre!" he had answered.
"Let Monstre!" she had playfully declared.
"Montre, mon petit, la montre!"
But he was later mangled in the quagmire of Verdun.
[Actually he died of influenza
On a crowded troop ship.
And Wilson, in despair, was heard
To hum the children's song
About the little bird named "Enza"
Who flew on wings of plague
Through every door and window.]
But Lady Ashley countered
Death and sickness
With the haze of pleasant times,
The little incidental brushstrokes
That furnish mental prisons
And tame their harsh decor.
Little Jean had lit the forests
Of her intellect
With laughter.
And she continued:
"And where to zones begin?"
Half-searching for a lover's pun
From her pupil of fourteen,
American abroad,
She guessed at "Venus,"
But he had rolled away
Into the shadows
And whispered from the dark,
"Green Witch! Green Witch!"
And she smiled and whispered back
"Greenwich, Greenwich, mon amour!"
And they laughed and sang and almost touched
A bit improperly
Until the sun
Went down behind the skyline
And the lamps came out like torches
At the feast of Charlemagne.
Or was he later tangled in a jump at Chateau-Ferry?
iv.
But that was long ago.
She married Colonel Ashley
And two years after
He was killed by snipers
In his tent behind the lines.
The terror of his death
Was some diminished
By the rumor of a mistress
In a shabby border town.
She managed all the proper sighs
And tears and gentle moans
At his funeral back in Paris.
His unfaithfulness
Had spawned her periodic dream.
She stood, as in a painting,
In autumn
There beside a giant oak
In the middle of a forest.
She wore a purple outfit
That echoed flecks of color
From the moonlit rocks
Above a grotto
And from the leaves.
There was music,
Was Ravel and not Ravel.
And then the woman
Came, the ghost of his dead mistress,
Said, by some, to catch the sniper's bullet
First, before it entered him.
But then the ghastly change:
The mistress metamorphosed
To another self. . .a larger Ruben body
With no Renaissance proportions.
And then, she, Lady Ashleigh,
Saw that it was she, herself,
The very ghost of drab and gravity
And sorrow.
And then she moved her own right leg
So deftly, so artfully,
Across her left.
She held a pose of subdued energy
And charm.
At the last, right before the shock
Of waking from her dream,
She handed forth her mirrored earrings.
For several evening after,
She would take an extra lozenge
From her cloissone container.
v.
And now, past middle years,
She always graced her porch
For two hours after sunset.
And when the mercury lights
Had turned the sidewalk green,
She always puzzled through the headlines
Of the evening paper.
A world of brittle games.
She listened for the noises
Of the Titan lad upstairs,
Her renter in these meager times.
She listened to the sounds of female trophies won
Upon a field of mocking battle.
He, the Titan lad, would soon be chosen
For some modern crusade.
She did not begrudge his lusts
Though the ancient codes of love,
The grace of tone and innuendo,
Lay shattered in his wake.
But she still remembered
All the subtle hints and motions
Of the days with her young pupil.
The way she tossed her hem upon the lawn,
The tilting of a parasol
To catch the glint of sun upon her cheek,
The half-suggestive phrase beside the river.
How many nights
The lattice threw
A gridiron on her face and dress,
And she would fly
Beyon the last meridian.
But soon the mercury torches
Found her frozen in the swing.
The universe, thus seen,
Became a fairytale without a climax.
Coda
Over the trenches of the Western front
The moon slumbered like a dead white hound.
Dead and white, white and dead,
His master's voice, the unheard melody.
That bald spiked helmet-laden head
Old Kaiser and all his fellow clowns
Turned down the lamps; we would never see
Them glow again without the glare
Of Goya forms and Goya shadows.
The world. . .I think of Juliet put to rest,
Her winding sheet a chrysalis of terror.
She wakes, half-conscious of the swaddling stone,
Her lover dead, the echoing drone
Of Friar, Duke, and kinsmen on the air--
Grievance and reproachment,
Concession and request.
Prepare the funeral cakes,
Untune the strings,
Embrace the sea.
This is not Cana
Nor Thermopylae.
Max Edward Cordonnier
Revision and illustration of an early 70's poem.