Factories at Clichy: For L. B. (1960–2018)

Abstract

Factories at ClichyFor L. B. (1960–2018) Heather Treseler (bio) Keywords poetry, Heather, Treseler, painting, art, Van Gogh, France, Clichy, mills We came to think of it as our painting: two figuresembracing in a corrugated field, its patina of sunlightand stroked grasses beside the soot-stacks of factories,their stern faces flat as prisons. Plumes of smokeunraveling the shirt of sky. “You can’t have Paris without the mills of Clichy—”you say, and I think of night cafes, an opera houseflanked by winged horses, balconies spilling likebosoms in bloom. The morning streets, sweptand rinsed clean as a sleeper’s eyes of tousled dream. “You have the rest of your lifeto work,” you add with such pointed sharpnessthat I kiss you in the gallery where the touchingof art is otherwise prohibited, and an ancient lightor shadow falls across your face. How Van Gogh’s lovers, narrow and undefined,clutch each other as if at sole possessions, releasedfrom assembly lines to this unruly field of wildrye, long-haired rue: meadow of anotherage I might have walked with you. [End Page 316] Heather Treseler heather treseler is the author of Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook award. Her work appears in The American Scholar, Harvard Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals, and her poem “Wildlife” was chosen by Spencer Reece for the 2021 W. B. Yeats Prize. She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc