The Moravian town was well known for its chocolate pie,
and for the episodes in War and Peace
I found again while reading in bed last night.
From the far side of fifteen years, you write:
you have a son named R.; teach Spanish.
Here’s a photo of the park, the leaves.
Your favorite season’s autumn.
“Is there a way to read your poems?
Have a lovely day.” I look at the trees
and tell you, tell myself, that I remember it.
I send a photo back: the ocean, taken
from the deck at night. And then
I do remember, suddenly, the two weeks
we spent together. It was spring:
the rapeseed made the fields into
a single, undulating calico.
You brought me to a church, a teahouse,
a museum. Walking home from the movie theater
(The Life Aquatic,
dubbed in Czech)
there opened up, for the first time,
the art of living someone else’s life.
Falling asleep in the living room,
we told each other stories
we could barely understand.
Since then, a silence fell, has fallen,
falls on the page where the life could be.
Until today, my fault was to believe it.
Is that sound outside this morning
the wind in the trees, or the light shifting?
R. is asleep. End of story:
I came back, weeks later, from Romania,
sick, in love. You barely recognized me.