after they spoke he walked to carry his thoughts through a fog-numb berlin, september’s kill of dirt-gold leaves, lamp-lit breath and double seraphim (the couples out) (in matching coats) (to windowshop in tones as hushed) (as awed librarians)

he sought the cold to clarify his longing for such comforts as her tantalizing call half-promised: a stove-warmed kitchen and the cook in it, the postprandial dinner fadged in minutes; and imagine the phone between her shoulder and her Rossetti chin, no man to lift a spoon to then, no man to press her back into, no face-lost man in her book of kursiv hair, nor judge of the taste of her curry paste with his tongue-tip, lips, blessing kiss, breathless air

this walk in the cold was the closest he got to being there

what is the heart? a drum explaining Life to the body, or the red-walled bedroom of a lonely dream? let’s say it’s a newborn we take everywhere with us, a baby we can’t bear to leave, kicking as we carry it from point to point unseen like parents of a changeling or a vestigial teen. is His

as beautiful to Hers as Hers was to the god She did not care to keep?

in winter the foreign girl sings with her cocoa voice as she pedals her bike uphill, some think she’s puerto rican, a chica mami, untamed, some berliners claim she came from israel, or fancifully others suggest her family fled in well-bred exile from old red money, or black brazil

boys walking home from school who have committed to memory her body smashing the wrinkled mirror of the heated pool, who have committed to memory the superbity of green her eyes enjewel, or the beach-burned gold of her shoulder blades at the Strandbar at Monbijou’s gates, pause talkless as she crests the sundown hill shifting gears, each alone in reverie about that foreign girl turning 34 next year

there’s a dead sparrow on the brick walk in the garden, breeze-ruffled feathers on its thumb-sized chest suggest flight though its blood is a page-thick shadow on the brick she kneels on, probing with a twig. it’s gone

south for forever’s winter. the foreign girl’s lover calls her to dinner, she uses her fork to poke the chicken’s liver