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   r a s p e r r i e s    r e m e m b e r

--- 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.

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published in association with the |
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