Mandatory Evacuation
By Peter Makuck
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Mandatory Evacuation - Peter Makuck
Picnic near St. Rémy
These roadside poplars
in a long line
daub us with shade.
Wild poppies
the French call coquelicots
dot the high meadow grasses.
To our left a footpath
curves out of sight
leading to ladies
in long dresses,
parasols held overhead—
the bliss
of La Belle Époque.
Our blanket arranged
on new grass,
wine uncorked, we break
a baguette
and like ripping canvas
the sky shears
with six jet fighters
flying low.
Colors darken.
We plug our ears.
We wince.
We wait for Renoir-time
to return
its impossible sweetness
a long time gone.
Notes
Sunset spreads like a bloodstain
above this Spanish town, this overlook café.
You put down your pen and look around,
everything withering into words, but so what?
The narrow gorge now lives in your notebook
where dozens of swifts and kestrels will flare
again, swerving between the cliff walls
far below. Even that moment when a drunk
saw you peering over the edge and told you
women jump here, men over there,
laughing in your face through his wild beard
before he staggered away down the cobbles.
This is Ronda, one of the pueblos blancos
Hemingway used in a novel. The gorge,
deep at almost 400 feet, divides the town
and you imagine what happened to captives,
darkness seeping into the air you breathe.
A bent woman in black climbs step by step
to the church. A thin orange cat
eases along a wall that edges the drop.
Your coffee is gone. A bus starts up
and slowly groans across the bridge.
In a still moment, you pick up your pen
and from the other side comes a trumpet,
wavering phrases of a melody remembered,
the Aranjuez concerto, and the world
is reduced to those notes rising
like strange birds in the late orange light.
Orthodox Priest
Black cassock hiding his feet,
he drifted onto the terrace
of this hillside café with its view
of the Laconian bay full of sunset,
and took me from politics at our table
to dim orthodox churches
and chapels of the last two weeks,
to ikons and frescoes,
those wide eyes of saints and scribes
that resurrected my altar-boy moments
of flickering candles, holy oil, incense,
and echoing quiet.
Our talk tacked like sails on the bay
as I watched him alone at the railing,
gold crucifix at his chest, long gray beard,
kamilavka crowning his head.
Far below were red-tile roofs, shadows,
the snares of everyday passion.
Turning from the rail, he passed our table
and looked down on me
from those ikons, frescoes, and vaults—
reminders of sheer silence, thin places,
caves, hermits, and monasteries
high in the mountains.
Table talk returned to my ears. Cats
at my feet meowed for a handout.
Our talk was politics again
until loud voices and laughter had me turn
to a table where the priest
now sat with the owner and his friends.
Leaning back in his chair, legs crossed,
fine Italian shoes exposed,
he was smoking a cigarette,
arguing politics, and drinking ouzo,
just like me.
Burro at Christmas
This jenny watched me lean against the fence
from the far side of the pasture.
When I dangled my hand with a carrot nub,
she slowly plodded my way, stopping to rip
some grass, taking her time. The first nub,
she lipped from my palm and crunched
allowing me to scratch her ears, pat her
smooth gray flanks with those dark lines
that legend says were left by the legs of Christ.
With the second carrot I was elsewhere,
thinking maybe about