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. 

“I know that in 1969, while twilight, striped by the half-open venetian blinds, gathered in the parking lot behind the ballet studio where, in an hour, my mother would arrive in our Ford Country Squire station wagon to pick me up, when I looked at that photograph I thought, ‘There is another life.’”

“The seat to my left was empty. It was to remain empty all evening.”

"I was angry at the heat, which prevented me from walking until the evening, and at being in Rome again without you, as if Rome for me would always be a city where you were not."

“Each week, I drove in the spiral, north and east and south and west, and returned to sit on the small sofa.”

“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.