Four Poems

America

Broad and smiling as a Sunday
rivermouth, impossible word

between us: america.
Wide and easy speech, argument smooth

and seamless as an egg. Half-tongued
I stumble through the station at

Stephansplatz, past memorials
to lost wars, and to the playground

in the beautiful gardens, where
I watch my children disappear

undisturbed: macht's nichts, sie kommen
wieder zurück. America

is where we can never meet,
though we lived there together for years.



In the dying days of the year we walked
...