Walking Through a Forest in the Rain: Near Levet, France
(Four Our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary)
In the novels and films
there’s always an abandoned barn;
pretty soon, the lovers
have a fire crackling like popcorn,
a rabbit roasting.
The, they’re kissing,
the camera discreetly following
smoke through the hole in the roof
But when we’re caught
in a cold spring downpour
in the woods behind the town
where my wife’s sister lives
in La France Profonde,
the one house—
at the forest crossroads—
looks witchly ominous:
a curtain shifts and falls.
Next month, we’ll be married
twenty-five years;
our lovemaking in beds these days
though we never found
the abandoned barn
of a romantic movie or book.
We trudge back to Gail’s,
me grumbling about the rain
like a querulous old man.
But in our guest room
Beth and I dry each other off
with thick towels and kisses.
And suddenly, it is a novel,
it is a film: and we’re very,
very French; and very, very young.