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spoke in tongues before he died
in Arkansas. Maybe the chaotic
spirit that urged him to kill
made him whole before the State
succumbed to its functioning.
Or maybe the unthinkable,
the horrifying maybe of maybe
he was not the man they thought
and not the man they killed.
So what happens? The living go
on past Little Rock to move
potatoes about their plates,
watch CNN in a bland motel,
praying and failing to refocus.
They consider questions
and white men make clichés,
each harboring Jesus as He
to right all wrongs, each confusing
beauty and truth. The burden
lies elsewhere always, the burden
of doing for the dead what we
could not do before.

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Ich gewöhne mich daran, hier, im Sitzen, wie jemand zu wirken, der sich anlehnt, manchmal nach vorne beugt, solang die Umgebung raumfüllend und im Ungewissen bleibt. Die Zunge kommt im Mund herum, Minuten vergehen. Ich will auf Weißes zurückgreifen können, wenn links im Fenster die Wolken ziehen. Den Kopf habe ich im Voraus gedreht, mit der Hand eine Tasse gedrückt. Bücke ich mich, sehe ich, wo vorher nichts war, die Füße. Ich müsste schon etwas gesagt und Wäsche zusammengelegt haben. Licht ist gefallen, das Gartengrundstück nachgekommen, kann mir gehören, ein Beieinander eigener Worte sein, eine Übereinkunft mit Gras und den Konturen der Büsche.

I’m getting used to appearing, here, while sitting, like someone who leans, bends forward sometimes, as long as the surroundings are space-filling and remain in the dark. My tongue travels around my mouth, minutes go by. I want to be able to reach back to something white when clouds go by in the window to the left. I’ve turned my head in anticipation, squeezed a cup with my hand. If I bend down I see, where before there was nothing, my feet. I must have already said something and folded the laundry. Light has fallen, the garden plot has followed, could belong to me, a juxtaposition of my own words, an accord between grass and the contours of the bushes.

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There—there it is—in the deep, purple crescents beneath the old, remembered sparkle of now extinguished eyes. There in a devastating image from Wilbur, in a near-silent line of Thomas. In the broken forgiveness of your voice across the interminable wire, I hear it. In fifty seconds of Schubert that presses the burning coal up from its lodged space in the chest to the constrictions of the throat. Like swallowing warm shards of glass that start the swell of tears, ineffable, inexplicable—like the primal sound of first grief. Would that I could dissolve into the air—disintegrate into formlessness, indistinguishable from the dew drop that clings to your morning window.

Musical composition by Franz Schubert

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