S.KRAUSE

Words

Like a vocabularly list spoken from a pebble-filled mouth, words flowed generically and incomprehensibly over the mourning gathering. Mute songbirds dared not twitch in the grove; only balding branches whispered in the wake of the wind's passing.

``Wait. You, too, will soon rest.'' Maple leaves drifted fragile like fading photographs, hovering, waiting above the cooling grave.

From above silent distant peaks darkening thunderheads approached, drops of water sifted through our protective canopy, and a melancholic rhythm caught our mood.

``Margaret.'' Her name said, I found a word to grasp, a thing to hold, in and of itself. Gretchen. A fist clenched in pain. The promise of late dawn gone, the black mid-morning sky bid us farewell as the downpour drowned all remaining laments and prayers.

Child in my arms, I turned my back to the clearing and went to seek home. Later they would say, he spoke nice words at her funeral.

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Notes: This is another of the texts I wrote my confinement of 2001, when I spent a month studying for exams. This text is full of references. At the website kuro5hin.org I wrote a text that discussed the different plurals for word in German (see Rose Ausländer's ``In Wonder'' in the Translation section), and the first and last sentences of this text refers to those differing plurals. The outline of the text vaguely follows Goethe's poem ``Wanderers Nocturne II'' (see the Translation section). Margaret is the main female figure in Goethe's Faust; Gretchen is a diminutive form of Margaret. In Faust, Faust gets Gretchen pregnant, leaves her, and she—being an unwed mother—kills her own child, and is put to death. I remember a guide book I once read; it claimed that Hungarian sounded as if the speaker had rocks in his/her mouth. Finally, more so than in my other texts, each word was carefully chosen and each sentence slowly constructed (e.g. the ``improper'' use of adjectives in place of adverbs).