Colette Inez

The Spell of the Mother Land

“O the mind, the mind has mountains . . . "

My mother lectured the crow on the suppleness of song. Like me the bird repeated what he chose to hear. A damp wind from the Pyrenees conversed with her grave at Espiens. Half shapes, fox, goat, blue fish in the clouds. No one said the beauty of the evening would shield me from the facts. What remains will dream through upheavals of earth.

"Cliffs of fall"

I leafed through her papers. She wasn't as solitary as I once believed. Postcards from the British Museum, Luxor, Pompeii signed "Edwige," "Ursule", or by professors excusing delays of manuscripts and checks. The long drive curved into town. At dusk purple martins annulled a swarm of gnats. What hummed in them hums in me. Fire ants bequeathed red welts. Overhead, red‑eyed Aldebaran in Taurus lowering his horns. Here were the delicate veins of spring stars in the province of her birth..

"Frightful, sheer..."

De la Tour, the custodian, sawed off a bough from the plan­tain tree. I heard the river's voice slur like a woman with a stroke. How slowly she unwound her reveries in skeins of amber, that eye color of my maternal side, Marthe, Marie and Ambroisine‑yellow glints in their irises. Medicine from a brown bottle trickled down my mother's throat. Papers that might connect us nowhere to be found. His pic­tures and letters torn to shreds and burned. Who finally knew her?

"No man fathomed... "

Wings closed, a sulphur waited for the sun's decree on a cloudy afternoon. I stepped through a swarm of my mother's words: chalice, provost, gloss, internecine war. Lords of the south marched with clanking armor through refer­ences and further notes. The day I left the house, a leaf spun down from that royal palm planted by her father at the century's turn. I heard the language of sweep and fall, the shuddering disclosures.