The Verse Epistle is my favorite type of poem: in fact I found my poetic voice when my mentor Andrea Hollander suggested that I write a “postcard poem” and this poem came rushing out! I’ve never been able to publish it (apart from in my own published chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press 2016)) but it remains one of my personal favorites. I later wrote a companion response poem “Abelard’s Lost Letter to Heloise” which was published in The Copperfield Review last year. I’m trying to have a poem published every month this year, and as I’ve had no takers for March, I decided to self-publish this one! This is my response to the dVerse Verse Epistle challenge!
Heloise Alone, Argenteuil, 1118
Here, where the Seine flows widest
and deepest, I have walked and wept,
thinking of you. I could drown
the village twice over with my deluge
of desperate tears, strip down the convent
stone by stone with my heart’s hurricane fury.
Dust billows as I pace along verdant fields
of early spring asparagus—like us,
its spears survive summer’s punishment
and resist winter’s cutting tongues.
I pray we too will be long-lived
and live to see our wild seed,
our precious son, shine like the silver
the Gauls mined from these glades.
Let him be our secret silver vein,
ground out of galena, found by chance,
forged from the heat of the waters
flowing through and around the ore.
Tonight, I fling no more bitter
words at you, but in my mind,
I raise a glass of fine Argenteuil wine,
sweet as nectar, clear as tears,
to you, my Pierre, my own, my all,
and try to forget how you spared
no pity for your Heloise, how time
surges between us like a black waterfall.
Our past sins, our fractured lives—
soon nothing but drowned stars in dark skies.
How many centuries must sail over our dust
before moneyed men of leisure float
to these shores to race their pleasure boats
and famed painters flock, entranced,
to capture the rippling reflections
of tall masts on silvery depths,
heedless that they play and laugh and splash
their colored oils upon the canvas
of your shame, my pain?
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