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FOUND IN TRANSLATION
by Marilyn Hacker
for Claire Malroux
On a beechwood sideboard, there sat in state
an object whose functional equivalent
would be, in American, a trivet,
but "trivet" originally meant
something three-legged -- no, that isn't it.
A recollection that I can't translate:
carved wood, a blue ceramic square,
chimes which a child with short brown hair
released into the air, turning a key,
on a noon-shuttered kitchen's red-tiled floor.
The still heat of the estival Midi
exhaled, leonine, beyond the door
as the child, bare-legged and barefoot,
made up verses for
the tune she'd conjured out of the hot-plate ---- if that's the word for it.
A gray June afternoon outside Auxerre,
the last few tables of a flea-market;
on one of them, box-like, carved wood, a square
tile, with fin-de siècle bathers, set
in it, a key between its four squat feet
which I turn. "Für Elise"
chimes in the dusty marketplace.
And somehow I participate
in a midsummer memory
of a cool moment, a still neutral date.
The thin child, a large scab on her right knee,
stands in the shuttered midday darkness, while
I hold what's entered my own history:
music, carved wood, a blue ceramic tile.