Continued. Piotr Sommer

can they call them bridges,

      yesterday Smithy, before that Hebden,

      and now Sowerby and purple foxgloves

      on the embankment. And still

      I haven’t figured out who

      I’m saying this to, or even who

      would care that through the leaves

      you can see Halifax

      and someone’s life, June being so transparent,

      though yesterday it rained and clouds came out.

       Municipal Services

      On the second anniversary, oddly, there wasn’t time,

      just snow, which amounts to the same thing.

      I was moving in water up to my mouth,

      though the streets were cleared faster

      than the snow could fall.

      I was waving my arms about, I was gathering air,

      I went back to my rented home

      but I couldn’t concentrate on sleeping.

      I got the order confused, and the new one

      seemed to me more beautiful.

      If you have any plans of coming back,

      at most I’ll miss my stop, I’ll overshoot

      a continent, I’ll open my mouth and won’t reply

      to the question I have no answer for.

       Continued

      Nothing will be the same as it was,

      even enjoying the same things

      won’t be the same. Our sorrows

      will differ one from the other and we

      will differ one from the other in our worries.

      And nothing will be the same as it was,

      nothing at all. Simple thoughts will sound

      different, newer, since they’ll be more simply, more newly

      spoken. The heart will know how to open up and love

      won’t be love anymore. Everything will change.

      Nothing will be the same as it was

      and that too will be new somehow, since after all,

      before, things could be similar: morning,

      the rest of the day, evening and night, but not now.

      i.m. Milton Hindus 1916–1998

      And later just to look into their papers,

      half-read in their lifetime, letters —

      if there were a place to keep them

      and they hadn’t been chewed up by mice in the attic

      or soiled by the marten

      which no one ever saw but everyone

      suspected of subletting—or even

      to enter them by hand into hard memory

      since that might be the way to treat them

      to a new time, another round —

      not that we have more of it now,

      but, older for a moment, we can almost see them

      the way they wanted to be seen,

      “With a New Preface by the Author,” in which

      with us in mind, who else,

      they still managed to correct this or that.

       Short Version

      I couldn’t be with you when you died.

      Sorry, I was toiling day and night

      on the title of a poem I didn’t have time to show you.

      You really would have liked it.

      Even if the poem itself

      wasn’t the strongest, I was counting on the title

      to prop it up from above,

      to set it right even, and to sanction it

      as sometimes happens, I don’t know

      if the nurse ever had time

      to give you the news

      because when I called it was

      already late, though finally

      she took the whole message.

       Tomorrow

      Whoever lives on will tell us how it was; whoever survives the rest will tell it more precisely.

       Shepherd’s Song

      Read these few sentences as if I were

      some stranger, some other

      language, which I may still be

      (though I speak with your words, make use

      of your words);

      which I was, speaking

      your language,

      standing behind you and listening

      wordlessly,

      singing

      in your tongue

      my tune.

      Read as if you were to listen,

      not to understand.

       Sometimes, Yes

      After reading certain young authors

      I too would like to be an author

      and turn out works.

      Right now I’m thinking of J.G. —

      his happy rhymes, cinematic sentences and

      the heroes in his poems, the real ones

      and those made up. Because of course

      poems have their heroes as well,

      some not even all that

      likeable. Of the real ones

      for instance, I recall

      Ezra Pound, whose name

      appears in one of the titles,

      or that Mid-November Snow

      which, before it melted, the author thinks

      had blanketed all the evil.

      Of the unreal ones Kirillov, a suicide

      and yet a builder, or that

      professor, what’s his name,

      a scholar of seventy now.

      And I, what would I write poems about?

      I’d have to think,

      because in fact I’m fed up with them.

      I ask my wife but she just repeats

      “What about?” as if she weren’t