--- C A R M E N   B U T C H E R

a stall burning, raw-tongue paralysis, a plunger on a dirty look, heavy
feet tracing spool- shaped bricks back to the nunnery, Like Mother sews
with.  Filofax says Theresianum- Lehrschwestern von Heiligekreuze
Mainzerstrasse 47 Boppard am Rhein is August 1983:  green vines, echt
castles under a movie blue, alien Rotary men.  In a small train station a
college grad loses a mark to buy a vanishing record Americanized at
90-something, anyway, An A-, uncharacteristically pleased.  She takes her
first taxi/Mercedes ride, Look, all Mercedes, but dirty.  Then, leaving
the new suitcase never rolling as advertised with some
trustworthy-sounding man living at the top of some breathless hill for
some price, I start my platonic relationship with always candid barriers
where shining rainbows, golden sweet steam, sophisticated midnights shout,
when anytime later I am drawn away by Angels, my passport asking down
cobbled streets past yellow likely leaves and busy legs and old stones,
ear-blind, to a great thing of lumber--I guess a knock because a page from
Chaucer came, slender, saying something about why euphony in my language
or hers.  I like the way she stands there slowly but do leave;  however,
when thunder behind holiness disturbs to eviction another Goethe student,
some chattering, sleepless long-haired I think brunette, Oh, but I grew up
right next to eighteen-wheelers and the constant dissonance of more than
one crooked still- life (because I hated my fat, chin-haired landlady
living World-War-II-bitter down to the end of the century in the narrowest
dark street where roofs met) I offer only to discover a garage apartment
with a weighty answer bigger than my imagination (or hand)  for a Martin
Luther gate and my thin, plump, undistinguished, comely, young, gray
neighbors' faces framed in black and white serenely singing, Walk our
garden paths and be at home.  I try in costly Nikes achieving peace on
perversely burnt popcorn nightly because I like it but not students who
don't even know me asking rude questions, panicked Strassen finally
shoving novel ices down, strangers, the widow under the Linden trees
beside the flowing boats taking me to her simple home silently, giving me
tea in the dark of September, till morning and I can somehow find my
penguins huddle beside my bed after more black bible, but they only see my
stomach and bring Berg's, and I think their master deaf because after I
still shiver, potatoes scare me though I walk again in Eden.  That is why
raspberries remember best.  There were also apples in a bowl seen through
the kitchen window from the garden, then apples (that could have peeled
themselves) beside curled peelings, then more green, gold.  But
fruit-stupid from Georgia Himbeeren was as fremd to me as those
incandescent rubies I had never touched or even seen before on that quiet
bush that walked on a dark moon with me, convalescence grabbing something
like sanity from sheer loveliness, till my admiration became embarrassment
and then surrender, chewing even as we speak.