The American Poetry Review
Rita Dove

Ripont

Early fall in the fields, a slow day's drive south
of Paris, French birds singing frenchly enough
though we didn't know their names in any language--
not even the German of my husband
reared in a village like the one we were passing
in our rusty orange BMW, baby daughter
crowing from the back seat, her plastic shell
strapped over the cracked upholstery

We were en route to the battlefields of the 369th
the Great War's Negro Soldiers
who, it was said, fought like tigers
joking as the shells fell 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 End All Wars

We followed cow paths bisected pastures
barreled down stretches of gravel arrow straight
until the inevitable curve signaling each hamlet
noonday silence dreary stone barns and a few
crooked houses, cobblestones boiling up
under our wheels the air thick with flies
the sky streaked, cream stirred in a cup

The maps we'd bought in Montparnasse were exquisite
Each dry creek bed and fallow square
each warped stile or cracked fountain appeared
at the appointed millimeter under my index finger
This afternoon the battlefield at Ripont,
one more name in a string of villages
destroyed during the course of their own salvation
We were thrilled when the copse of oaks
appeared on the left just as the five dots printed
in the crease of the Michelin had predicted;
we counted the real trees to see if there were five
of them too but there were seven Down an embankment

then to the blue squiggle denoting a stream,
our daughter gurgling her pleasure as I reached back
to feed her another spoonful of Gerber's spinach
cold from the jar Then a sharp right
onto the map's dotted line, two tire tracks
leading into deeper foliage, path blotted by vines
the sun a cottony blur too far off to help us
through locked branches a sudden rectangle yellow and black
Attention--Minen watch out for mines

This was the village before that September
decades ago, before victory ploughed through
leaving her precocious seeds Past
the brambles the broken staves of barbed wire
we could see a frayed doorway a keystone
frame of a house gone a-kilter
like a child's smudged crayon drawing

A branch slapped the windshield I shrieked
rolled up the windows as if tragedy were
contagious, as if our daughter could detonate
the mines by tossing her rattle into the briars
We were in deep no way out except by
shifting in reverse so we drove on till at last
there came a clearing a crabgrass mound
choked under a layer of gleaming automobiles

Nothing to do but park so we pulled behind
a Peugeot got out and followed the road
on foot turning a bend onto a smattering
of people decked out in their somber best
some older ladies with corsages some with veils
a lean man with the hat and mustache of a mayor
was giving a speech We made out
the year of the battle, the name of the town
a bugle sounded as two old soldiers laid down a wreath
and only 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 else could we do we smiled back
we let them believe we drove with the crowd
single file through the woods to the river
where we turned left they turned right,
some of them waving
our daughter waving back
We kept on until twilight stopped us
found an inn in a town not starred on our map
where I sat in a room 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


dove Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Her latest poetry collection, American Smooth, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in September 2004. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.


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