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LANDSCAPE AT CHAMPROVENT
Perhaps she can see as far as Paris, perhaps Brussels.
From the hilltop where the girl has come to watch sunset,
the summer landscape of hills and pastures is spread out
in the way her toys a few years before were spread out
on the floor of her room. Here, lying in the grass,
she tries to recover that sense of omnipotence as if
she could move a field, adjust a mountain, lift the large
white house beneath her, stick it back in its wooden box.
But as she watches the patterns of countryside unroll
toward the ocean, she knows in her bedroom she never
felt the wonder she feels on most days watching the world
around her, such as she had felt that morning crossing
the fields to the village. But then she came upon the butcher
beating his dog, kicking it for stealing scraps,
lifting it by its collar and hurling it against a wall,
and even though she had seen other dogs beaten and worse,
today she felt the world was being smashed within her
and she wanted to crawl to her bed, heap blankets over her.
Here, on this hilltop at sunset, the girl is attempting
to repair her world, but in the dark line of trees,
in the huge cities she can almost see in the distance,
the girl believes she can see animals being mistreated,
people being kicked and pushed aside, as if the golden
spaces in between were only glittering distractions
from the true business of the world. And unwillingly
she realizes the landscape stretched before her
is opposite from the landscape on the floor of her room:
these fields don't belong to a world of her imagination,
but rather she belongs to the butcher's world
for it to play with her as it chooses. Watching the sun
disappear beyond the farthest hills, the girl dreads
the darkness hidden within houses, tucked beneath trees;
and as she enters the evening she feels the darkness
will never entirely pass by, as behind her from the east
she can see night approaching and with it the sound
of yelping, the sound of the butcher beating his dog.
THE MOUNTAIN
Who does the mountain belong to anyway? As Wordsworth
believed all mountains belonged to him, so these
seven people think it belongs to each of them alone.
To the left, a young man with pipe and backpack
kneels and sticks his staff hard against the rock
like a sword to a Saracen neck. In kneeling,
he copies the contours of the pinnacle behind him,
and he's of the opinion this constitutes possession.
But beside him the beautiful blond girl disagrees
as she lifts her joined hands into sunlight, mimicking
the masculine shapes of jutting rock, believing
such sympathy makes her mistress of all she surveys.
On the ground at right, a girl in a red coat pretends
to sleep, her body imitating the gentle slope, while
with her ear to the earth she hears a faint whispering
promising to love her alone. Behind her a young man
recites poetry to the stone out-cropping he would
like to become. What kind of poetry? Take a guess:
Peruvian or Swiss. A little further an old couple dawdles
at the cliff's edge. The man points to where his trucks