Vox Populi
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Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Farmer’s Market in Antwerp
A cool noon sun haloed her hair, white as the tall
tulips she placed in her one old galvanized pail.
I remember this so clearly — as if it happened today.
How she arranged her skirt, rubbed her hands together.
How it sounded like sandpaper on leather. She placed
a few honey jars next to a basket full of parsley, took
a few steps back, checked it carefully, then sat on a crate
by her table. It’s only then I noticed him — as she rested
her feet on his flank — a large brown mutt dosing under
that table. He didn’t lift his head, or even open his eyes,
but slow and glad, his thick tail wagged up & down
on the dirt, & scuffed up dust into a gold swirl in the sun.
That’s it — that’s all I remember. But in my California
mega-market which play “Singin’ in the Rain”
every time they mist their blue-lit produce, I know
that when I’ll reach for parsley, it’s them I’ll remember
& have for over a half-century. I know that, each time
I’ll step out of that building’s whooshing doors,
I’ll hold my parsley like a bouquet for those two —
that woman & her dog.
~~~~
Copyright 2024 Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Lately (Sungold Editions, 2023) and These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, (Ausable Press 2008) was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium.
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I love this memory poem. I hear the woman rubbing her hands and I, like you, beautiful poet, still see the lovely dog–
“his thick tail wagged up & down
on the dirt, & scuffed up dust into a gold swirl in the sun.”✨
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Thank you, dear Lisa!
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such a beautiful image/memory…
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Oh, how I love Laure-Anne’s voice in this poem – soft as a prayer, yet strong as a memory that lasts and lasts.
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Laure-Ann’s poem could be a companion and guide for us, every day: how to see, feel, remember, be.
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Thanks for enriching my reading with rich images and fond memories.
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The scent of parsley filled my memory with this poem. None growing in my garden this year, but later I will snip off rough skinned okra and resign myself to resigning all the corn to some furry thief.
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This memory full of loving detail brought me back to Antwerp where I lived for about a year. And I thought of Proust’s madeleine which for Laure-Anne is the bouquet of parsley. I am sometimes taken back to Antwerp by the voice of Jacques Brel.
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Any nation that could claim both Laure-Anne and Jaques Brell as post-WW II voices would be blessed indeed.
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To Rosemary and Warren – first, thank you with kind friendship for your generous comments, I do feel quite moved by them. Also, I was lucky enough to personally know Jacques Brel (Jacky as his friend called him) for only a very short year when I was in my early to mid-twenties. He was, in my heart and memory, a kind, shy, awkward man, and beautiful heart, humble and passionate, and could be surprisingly funny. Smoked a pack or two of Gauloises a day, loved his country, but, in the late 50ies and 60ies Belgium was too small for him, and soon Paris and its much larger musical/poetry/show business scene (as well as meeting a singer-songwriter he LOVED: Georges Brassens, and another genius Léo Ferrré) attracted him, and we lost him…but not his songs, not his voice, not his unforgettable art.
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Such a painterly poem guiding our gaze over the woman. And like film, allowing her movement to reveal the sweet, large dog. And then taking us to Ginsberg’s supermarket, but here the angels are memory’s, a woman, a dog, and their tribute, the parsley bouquet! So well done, so full of compassion.
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A day that begins with a poem by Laure-Anne is already a great day.
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I feel the same way about her work, Warren. Thank you.
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I read this as a poem about love and beauty. A simple-sounding surface to a deep experience. If someone said to me that love poetry is a thing of the past, irrelevant, or whatever, I’d point them to this poem as the refutation. For my own life and writing it is a touchstone. And oh, the amazing line: it scuffed up dust into a gold swirl in the sun. The poem does that. The tail of a dog, the tale of joy.
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Its a picture she makes so vivid in living detail of language. Further, I can hear her rich sonorous voice telling the story word by word, comprising the scene in its elements as I read these lines that place me into the most wonderful other world. Its a perfect Monday poem to jog us back to the workdays, and now I must hurry out the door to feed yearling heifers and bulls and take old cows to market in Okeechobee as if there’s barely time for it all.
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Thanks for your commentaries which enliven my understanding of the poems. They point creatively at the deep places in interesting ways. And one summer, I was the “hired man” on a small dairy farm, so know those early morning feeding (and milking) schedules. Also, carrying the old mother cows or too-lively calves to a very different market than the ones in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s poem.
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Thankyou so much for saying so!
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Laure-Anne’s ability to find inspiration in simple scenes other people wouldn’t notice is truly remarkable.
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