Michelle McGrane: Two Poems

Michelle McGrane

Michelle McGrane is the author of Fireflies & Blazing Stars (2002) and Hybrid (2003). Her third collection, The Suitable Girl, is forthcoming in the United Kingdom in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and South Africa. She was born in Zimbabwe in 1974, spent her childhood in Malawi, and moved to South Africa with her family when she was fourteen. Michelle lives in Johannesburg and blogs at: http://peonymoon.wordpress.com.

The Remise of Marie Antoinette, aged 14

Far from Vienna, a curlew’s liquid trill ripples the air. Willows bracing the muddy bank dip and trail fronds through the Rhine’s swift currents. On the Île des Épis, a pavilion. Organza rustles, Sèvres porcelain tinkles on a silver salver. The smell of chocolat chaud pervades the tapestried salon. (To the right, Jason grieves over his children's corpses, to the left, Medea flees in her dragon-drawn chariot.)

They strip me, leaving Austria crumpled at my feet, lacing the whalebone corset so tightly I can scarcely breathe. Circling and circling, the coiffured courtiers slyly eye my flushed cheeks, newly formed breasts and hips, tittering pianissimo behind lacquered fans. The Duchesse de Picquigny twitters in her sing-song voice, a bright-eyed parakeet. The beaked Comtesse de Noailles buttons me into cloth-of-gold, fingers needling, lips carved in a permanent moue.

Stiff curls piled on her head, Madame la Dauphine enters the country of loneliness in silk stockings and satin mules, while I, slipping from beneath her powdered skin, edge out of the frame, steal through taffeta curtains barefoot, past gilded caryatids, silver-wigged footmen in fleur-de-lys. Diving into the green river, a purseful of livres seamed in my chemise, I strike out for wild bird calls, ragged long grass, wet earth.

remise: handover

Madame Bovary’s Final Visit

Not difficult after all then,
brushing past the apothecary’s apprentice,
the counter, scale, mortar and pestle,
through the laboratory’s glass door
to seize the Capharnaum key.

Upstairs, in his sanctuary,
phials and pharmacopoeias,
pill dispensers, distilled elixirs,
tinctures and pewter leech carriers
jostled on mahogany shelves.

Grasping the octagonal jar,
I lifted a powder-filled fist
to my lips, my throat constricted
with deceit and its answer.
Arsenic streaked my chin.

In the pillared market-square,
laughter swilled from The Golden Lion,
a conspiracy of gossip and innuendoes,
those provincial diversions,
splashed into the night.