Three poems

By Susanna Lang

On the Way to Somewhere Else

Uzès

On the Nîmes road, we pass a tower on a hilltop, houses shoulder to shoulder, their tile roofs. We tell each other that we should go there sometime. Around the bend, another hill, a tower, houses. More hill towns on the road to Avignon, the road to Anduze.

An old woman

her market basket

no list—

she’ll buy a small piece of beef

a little cheese

a head of lettuce

just as she did last week.

On the Venice road, as portrayed in a 16th century drawing. The city is in the mid-distance, not up a hill but across a river, the bridge not yet in sight. The artist hints at the stonework, arched or square windows, peaked roofs. He can’t see the streets that make room between one building and its neighbor. He never went there, never sat at a table long enough to drink a glass of red wine, read the shop signs, talk with the man at the next table about how things were going.

A few grapes still hang

from yellowing vines—the wine

will taste of late afternoons.

Things aren’t going well. Many of the vines in our region have been abandoned, or torn out by the roots. You can’t make a living anymore. The farmers dump loads of sheep’s wool or hay at the doors of government buildings, turn their village signs upside down in protest. Tic-tac, ça va péter! Next time, they announce, they’ll bring manure to the government’s door. Unless someone does something, unless there is a strong policy, des réponses concrètes. Unless the world goes back to what they remember, a place where they knew how to live.

Sun gleams on the tower at the top of the hill. We’re not going that way.

Ours, Not Ours

Uzès

A beech tree near the Alzon, root twisting back on itself, thick as its trunk. Someone has painted eyes, nostrils, stripes, yellow recently brightened—a serpent. The creature’s eyes follow me, skin dappled in light that filters through the leaves. I think of the paintings our ancestors left in caves, the urge to record, to hold the image of the thing in place, while the serpent itself slips into a crack in the stone.

Horses, bison, deer

run through the underground rooms—

the hunters follow

desiring their flesh, their grace.

Caves now closed, we can’t go in.

I climb the rise, loose gravel underfoot, soil washed away by heavy rain, snail shells beside the path. I gather the unbroken ones, carry them home in my pocket to wash and keep in a cloisonné bowl. Their stripes of muted blues, lavenders, ivory.

Once, by mistake, I brought home a live snail. I should have known—it was too heavy to hold only a plug of dry dirt. And no place with enough greenery to keep a snail alive, amid streets and buildings of dressed stone.

A snail from the hills

left between the paving stones.

Rain will paint its shell.

Taking the Train in New York

Though I was born in this city, I don’t hold

the rhythms of its trains in my bones.

I was small: I didn’t have to know

what train to take, where to get off.

Now I keep my eyes on the map as each stop

lights up, and a pleasant voice reminds us

our bags are subject to random searches by police.

My backpack sits in the circle of my arms,

a lap baby. A different voice announces

the next stop is East 105th Street, end of the line

but we were just on 14th Street and the exit

leads me up to Union Square, exactly where

I should be—they must have forgotten

to switch the recording when the L train

turned to go back downtown. The vendors

at the Christmas Market shiver in the thin sun.

I can’t see the sign for Christopher Street and I feel

lost again till a stranger says I am there already,

points me to the restaurant where you are waiting

at a back table, and it is my city again.

Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. She is the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, and her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). A new collection of Souad Labbize’s poems, Unfasten the Silk of Your Silence is now available from Éditions des Lisières. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her poems, translations and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Rhino Reviews, Mayday and The Slowdown. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, and she is now working with Hélène Dorion and Christine Guinard on new translations. More information available at www.susannalang.com