462 - Chartres Revisited: To a Critic

Chartres Revisited: To a Critic

By Anthony S. Abbott

"No-I hate 'France-poems'. Besides, it's sentimental and depends on a lot of easy adjectives."--Anonymous critic of a poem about Chartres

I picture you, crouched in a student union
upstairs, poems scrunched up before you
by hundreds, like shells of onion skins.

Your pen scratches with rage. "No-unmoving,"
you write with clear exacerbation. "No-
lacks the emotion it needs." Oh God

you shape the words with such deceptive ease.
Chartres, Vezelay, Mont St. Michel dismissed
like cattle branded in a gate. Next please.

I had wanted only to tease you into seeing
the glory of the South Rose Window on Easter
eve, lights off, candles snuffed, nothing

but the shift of sun in April staring behind
and the walls so black they seem the boundaries
of hell itself-and in the midst color and glass

floating blue and white in the circled light,
the silence deep as love, the German guide gone
to buy beer in the local pub, the travelers

shifting in crowded seats on the Paris train.
Outside, in the darkening west the gallery
of kings grey with the day's age, my host and me

nearly alone on this deserted stage, old man
paralyzed in leg and arm, staring with his one
good eye at the center of the Rose-Christ eternal,

angels, elders, beasts chanting songs of praise.
My host dreams of latter days when limbs will be
made whole, when souls and bodies mix in perfect

harmony and peace. Then suddenly the sun gives way
and the dark slides through the colored glass
like life expiring. Unexpected tears take the old man.

I rise and wheel him westward under the shape
of Jesse's rising stem, westward past Christ
enthroned in stone, out into the cobblestone street.

"Tres belle," I murmur to the old man's ear,
the only French I have. He gurgles some strange
laughter. "Oui," he says, "Ah, oui, tres belle."