REMEMBRANCE

I stand on the platform, watching you
step off the train. You’re different—
thinner, maybe, as though
the excess flesh has burned away. The years
pass through my fingers like the cold rain
falling on your coat, your hair,
your lips chewed raw.

Our train slides backwards, past
the darkened woods, the frozen
pond. The stars dull like heirlooms
in the morning sky. I recognize
the town, our little street. I hear the clink
of china; it’s Grete in the kitchen,
making breakfast. The lilac blooms
in the window, filling the whole house
with its scent….And the delicate tension
returns to your shoulders. You sit at your desk,
back straight, composing a letter
to your Brüderlein in England. Quietly,
I enter the study. You turn.

WINTER LIGHT

When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
—Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Early March. The ice stretches thin
over the pond’s dark
face. Now and then
a skater falls through,
does not come up. The buds
flush green, retreat
into their shells. In the immensity
of my forgetting, in the quiet
space of a single gesture, there,
a sprig of lavender appears
beside your hand. I hear
the first movement of Beethoven’s
Second, but that
is just the phonograph. All day
our sitting room brims
with sound. I should have
held you in the winter light,
held you
even as you held yourself against it.

BEETHOVENSTRAβE

Perhaps I’ll never understand why
you left me at night, left behind
the cloudy dregs of your after-dinner drink,
the scent of your perfume and pearls, warm
around your neck, then
cold from the icy wind in the Beethovenstraβe.

You said there is only one reality, that we
simply occupy different givens and so
indulge in the passage of time. Your time
has passed: the birds, drunk on cherry apples,
no longer congregate at your windowsill
three streets away. I’ve let you go.

Late September. Already the fires
have started in the south. The smoke
stings my eyes, and I remember
the day you held me at the center
of your rage, dark and perfectly calm,
then lashed me with your words.
But it was always what you didn’t do,
what you didn’t say, that hurt me.

THE LIVES OF OBJECTS

I share my home with carnival mirrors and tarnished silver, amulets in the shape of abacuses and African masks, dolls with molting hair and cracks around the cheeks where too many times they had been kissed by little girls, curios painted creamy white to cover half-finished portraits of ladies named Opal and Francesca in their pearls now shrunk to the size of babies’ teeth, a cold clair de lune rounding the blackened sylvan-scape on the far wall, moose heads with graying nostrils and sentient marble eyes that fix me with disdain, a flock of dead pocket watches sunk into a drawer like chandeliers in Triton’s ballroom, stacks of magazines and books long out of print which still hold a measure of interest for the transient, the lover, those who exist outside of time.