The Corsican Wife

Mountains coax a thin white moon
into their heavy breasts.

A clear sky exposes its secret stars,
she christens them with dead friends’ names.

a weathered old Peugeot rusts,
falling apart on a hard shoulder.

I sit on the Punta di Urghiavari,
giant, spiny lizards reaching into the sea,
my cap drying on a wooden cross.

Breathy hikers rumble in weighing
today’s collected rocks and blisters;
she bustles over dinner,
jemmying open bottles of fragrant beer.

Herbs of the hills shake themselves off
onto her bar-room floor to be gathered
with an old soft brush and thrown
into wild boar stew.

Her cottage yawns in the dusk,
hewn from surrounding pine.

An old man of the village shakes
chestnuts trawled that day,
toasting them on her beech-wood fire,
starters for the guests, washed down
with wine from young grapes.

A beck rushes beyond a little private
sewage works that feeds the stream,
frightens off the night fishes.

I watch her timid bravery,
glass cracks unfixed in the frosty porch,
Capricorn worm nibbles the roof away.

Her father loans the money so he can extract
a pound of desperate loyalty,
husband and lover circle each other
like dragonflies fighting for a leaf on a pond,
her children cry in the darkness of her dream,
refusing to switch on the lights.