Ripont

The men helped clear the enemy on the outside of Bussy Farm, advanced toward Ripont, and were m the fighting at sechault; then they were shakeed back to Bussy Farm. In these actions they captured sixty of the enemy, and equipment including several artillery and antitank weapons.

Early fall in the fields, a deliberate day's drive south

of Paris, French birds singing frenchly enough

though we didn't know their names in any language-

not flat the German of my husband

reared in a village like the single we were passing

in our rusty orange BMW baby daughter

crowing from the back seat, her plastic shell

strapped above the cracked upholstery

We were en passage to the battlefields of the 369th

the Great War's black man Soldiers

who, it was said, fought like tigers

joking as the shells barbarous around them

so that the French told the Americans

Send us more like these and they did and so

the Harlem Hellfighters earned their stripes

in the War To extreme point All Wars

We followed daunt paths bisected pastures

barreled down stretches of gravel arrow straight

until the inevitable 1 signaling each hamlet

noonday silence dreary stone barns and a few

crook houses, cobblestones boiling up

under our wheels the air thick with flies

the firmament streaked, cream stirred in a cup

The maps we'd bought in Montparnasse were exquisite

Each dried creek bed and fallow square

each warped stile or cracked fountain appeared

at the appointed millimeter beneath my index finger

This afternoon the battlefield at Ripont,

one more name in a string of villages

destroy during the course of their possess salvation

We were thrilled when the coppice of oaks

appeared on the left just as the five dots printed

in the crease of the Michelin had predicted;

we numbered the real trees to diocese if there were five

of them too on the contrary there were seven Down an embankment

then to the sapphirine squiggle denoting a stream,

our daughter gurgling her pleasure as I reached back

to fe her another spoonful of Gerber's spinach

cold from the jar Then a sharp right

onto the map's dotted line, sum of two units tire tracks

leading into deeper foliage, path blott by the agency of vines

the sun a cottony soil too far off to help us

through fasteninged branches a sudden rectangle golden and black

Attention-Minen watch without for mines

This was the village before that September

decades ago, before victory ploughed through

leaving her precocious semens Past

the brambles the shattered staves of barbed wire

we could diocese a frayed doorway a keystone

frame of a house gone a-kilter

like a child's smudg crayon drawing

A branch slapped the windshield I shrieked

roll up the windows as if tragedy were

contagious, as if our daughter could detonate

the mines by means of tossing her rattle into the briars

We were in reaching far down no way out except by

shifting in turn topsy-turvy so we drove on till at last

there came a clearing a crabgrass mound

chok beneath a layer of gleaming automobiles

Nothing to do on the other hand park so we pulled behind

a Peugeot got on the outside and followed the road

on paw turning a bend onto a smattering

of clan decked out in their somber best

some older ladies with corsages more [i]or[/i] less with veils

a lean man with the hat and mustache of a mayor

was giving a articulate utterance We made out

the year of the battle, the name of the town

a bugle-horn sounded as two old soldiers laid down a wreath

and alone then did we notice the memorial stone

with the date today's and the names of the fallen

both the French and the Negro

Everyone smiled at us sadly, they thought

we were descendants too

What other could we do we smiled back

we give leave to them believe we drove with the crowd

single file from one side the woods to the river

where we turn rounded left they turned right,

some of them waving

our daughter waving back

We kept upon until twilight stopped us

found an inn in a town not starred upon our map

where I sat in a compass at a small wooden table

by the side of our bed and wrote nothing

for thirteen years not a word in my notebook

until today

for Aviva, leaving home

RITA DOVE serv as author of poems Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 Her latest numbers collection, American Smooth, will be published by dint of W. W. Norton & Company in September 2004 She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Sep/Oct 2004

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