SEARCHING FOR CASTLES

                by Leslie Clark

      

             From foreign maps we choose
             the tiniest, weaving lines to follow
             in our rented car.  The roads
             barely traced in grey that meander
             along blue lines of minor rivers,
             and lead to villages with names in 
             scarcely discernable print.
             I tell you, that day,
             our mission is a quest for castles,
             monuments to some feudal lord's power
             where he could observe from his tower
             as serfs struggled below in rocky fields.

             We speed by vistas of startling green,
             the fields are never this emerald-bright at home.
             Breezes redolent of centuries of manure 
             waft in through our open windows.
             We seem to be the only car.
             People we pass, on foot or bicycle
             raise startled hands in greeting,
             stare after our bumper, wonderingly.  
      
             I point on the map to the castle symbol,
             a small cross topped with a battlement flag.
             "Here.  There should be a castle right here."
             You screech the brakes and we emerge, shade
             eyes from the glare, look over the open field
             at nothing, a tree or two scattered,
             as if tossed there, carelessly, by a giant’s hand,
             in the distance a small heap of tumbled stones.
             "Can that be all that's left?"
       
             As shadows crawl across the road
             we arrive at a village with
             a stern, stone square,
             a small hotel.
             We struggle, in language barely remembered
             from musty high school classrooms
             to engage a room from the smirking hotelier,
             eat dinner, according to custom, very late. 
      

             All night, as the town youths
             roar by on their mopeds,
             I dream of men in rough brown tunics,
             picks and hoes in hand,
             battering at great stone walls.