How They Lived

In this sunlight, it’s hard to imagine
that freezing winter’s thin light
struggling to enter the dark room

the four of them shared – Solange
playing as Chopin composed, Maurice
drawing while George Sand wrote,

theirs the closeness of exiles
confined in a monastery, the mountain
village remote, valleys plunging

below. And imagine how restless
the children were, the artists’ frustration,
Chopin coughing all hours, Sand’s

disdain of the island, its people
even more. The guide points
to a drawing of a flue leaning

from a window. There would have been
a pot of wood, she says, not a fireplace,
which is how they kept warm.