We look at the map. When we arrive in France from King’s Cross the fields are striated with barbed wire and it is raining.

Japanese Poems:

Between the bent boughs  
of the splayed sumac, the silver
owl rests his head

No one but lovers and children tell their dreams:
not fish, nearer fowl, where does that leave me—
bantam in the barnyard, pecking for mash.

It was a hot day in June.
Inside the aquarium it was so cool
after the bright light outside that

A thin gold catch like a bee’s stinger—
    but there are no bees in winter—
lost from a necklace of honey-colored beads,

Puma, cougar, mountain lion, loup—
   this is what I am afraid of. Ocarina,
small singing goose in the break-ax

The father of two silver medal figure skaters
said, “When they were eight and ten, I built a rink, twenty
by forty in the yard, without a fence. There was nothing

Rain of the months and years we had 
known each other pressed in, printing 
the new car as we left the wedding. 

“When I think of this picture in Assisi, to which I was drawn almost every afternoon during those strange weeks, my impulse is to lie down as if I, too, had been left for dead.”

“Like many things we think belong to us, it’s had a life of its own, like an old lover who resurfaces.”

I was caught between the present and the past like a fly to flypaper. The past is narrative, Primo Levi says; the present, description.