5,672 miles from Home

3 Flowers 50 x 20 cm mixed media

THE KISS?

Climbing a hill on the outskirts of Stuttgart

in late April, actually we were sort of

swerving, being young, like atoms in that grand poem

by Lucretius, handbook for enlightened

atheists, forsythia blooming

yellow all around us, apple trees soft

with white blossom and a beer garden

hundred meters or so above us

whose gate we found closed and locked.

There was a sign that told us why, but I couldn’t

read it: being a foreigner makes you instantly illiterate.

A radical reduction of related intellectual skills as well.

After a while even a kind of insanity becomes the norm.

Flowers trembling in a sympathetic breeze anyway—

Keats would have loved it, would have had

 a 19^thcentury Romantic conniption which might have

led to “Ode on Swabia”—but still no cold beer.

Five minutes later, it seemed, and it’s Carnival in Stuttgart.   

No shortage of anything cold. The parade outside Clara’s or

was it Sarah’s office window just above the Königsstrasse?

Early February, revelers wearing feathered masks

in the dark, blowing off pagan steam. Your friend was  

all alone and we talked. You two taking turns rushing off

to the WC. Spiked punch filling low capacity bladders.  

Then you were back, and she wasn’t, whispering moistly 

in my ear “Did you kiss her?” Strangers smooching in the shadows,

conducting instant love affairs in cobbled courtyards. In offices.   

Then you gave me a look that said—or at least I think it said—

”She will tell everyone you are boring.” I don’t think so,  

I answered in my thoughts—not if SHE kissed me. 

 

R.E.M. - Half a World Away