Mine
April is National Poetry Month, and there I was, April 13, 10 a.m., reading a poem by C.K. Williams, the one about how he would like to write a poem for every girl in the world and how everyone — children, congressmen, men in the woods, workers on the assembly line — should have a poem, should see one swing by on the hoist, should have one float down to them like a feather, find one written out on the underside of a turned stone… just the surprise of knowing that there are, out of nowhere, poems that are their poems alone, that their poems can be held inside of them and...
Read MoreThe Frozen Alster
Hamburg wraps itself around two lakes Formed by the river Alster. Once in a very rare winter they freeze solid Conjuring new space in the center of town. A sudden shortcut in the sunshine A huge white loop to skate or ski A nighttime fairground where you go to drink hot gluehwein Bought from lantern-lit booths suspended over water. To eat sweet powdered pastries and hear accordions play To watch the crowds of people laughing On a street that’s made of waves. It’s something to see but I never saw it Twenty years ago, at twenty-three. My bus stopped right around the corner at the...
Read MoreWinter Love Scene
(for Dr. Zhivago) THE SNOW KEPT THE WORLD AWAY and she held me as gently as sand holds sand. We moved like shadows moving toward eclipse. This woman opened her long-silenced lips, and Noise that had built a fortress in my land was hushed away, and I was still as lapses of consciousness at the threshold of a nap. THE SNOW PROTECTED US Holding her was a tingling in my nerves. She knocked gently at my courthouse heart and penetrated even to the government. Holding her was the wilderness of wharves in winter when the sailors all report: I skipped my ship, now I’m the...
Read MoreJungle
Today it’s so cold it’s hard to remember, the frigid air slipping in through collar, up pant legs, feasting on the exposed nose, searching out fragile fingers in and out of tight pockets, finding scalloped ears beneath a stocking cap, keeping lips a thin, hard line against the day that inside is a jungle, steamy and a steady ninety-eight-point-six, where every living creature, naked and glistening, luxuriates in a tropical heat and fecundity, a prelapsarian paradise of plenitude, where cold air and shivering bones are never...
Read MoreSilent Retreat
I am at the start of the line and the hush in the cafeteria is like the muffled dawn after a long night of snow. We enter into silence with all the awkwardness of travelers in a foreign country who know they have no other choice but to surrender to a language that is not their own. The most social among us try to catch someone’s fleeting glance or to meet smile with smile, while others avoid the eyes of those they have laughed with only yesterday, when speech was such a common thing it could be taken for granted, like the air or atoms. But in this other world of nontalk the slightest sound...
Read More