The Storm by Nancy Iannucci

The Storm, by Pierre Auguste Cot (b. France), 1880.

The Storm
 
We kept walking one
Warm Wednesday morning,
woefully walking,
conversing, traversing away
from the city of Toulouse-
distance was a shield from prying eyes,
eyes and mouths attached to crowds
who longed to separate us.
 
We reached our favoured
meeting place under
a canopy of draping trees
miles from the road.
Side by side we sat
like primitive cave dwellers
who lacked civilized restraint.
 
I’m the shepherd, but she tends me,
maneuvers my soul into a swell
of honourable  indecency;
I’m a doltish man under her touch
as our thighs gently grazed then pulsed.
 
She  came
to agree to leave France
with me
after weeks of furtive
meetings.
 
I brushed the sweat
from her golden hair-
Euphoric-
under wafts
of her sweet
lavender scent.
 
She took the horn from my side
and impishly blew a farewell tune
to Toulouse;
dark clouds instantaneously
rolled in like the French army.
 
“We should leave now!” I said
draping her yellow cloak
over our heads as if to
parachute away to the gods.
 
Our thighs pulsed once more;
my shepherd instincts dominated
as I tended my luscious lamb towards safety;
airily secure under her alabaster slip,
my hand steered below her left breast.
 
And so we loped
not from The Storm
but from this cruel city-
together.

Nancy Iannucci

Nancy Iannucci is a historian who teaches history and lives poetry in Troy, NY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Amaryllis, Eunoia Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Three Line Poetry, Fickle Muses, Red Wolf Journal, Rose Red Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Faerie Magazine (FB photography), Three Drops from a Cauldron, Mirror Dance, Pankhearst, Picaroon Poetry, Yellow Chair Review, and her poem, HOWLING, won Yellow Chair Review’s Rock the Chair Challenge. She is currently working on her first chapbook.