Sometimes it was just a humming
Which came through the windows at night
When I couldn’t sleep
The sun already warming
The cool air of night
The pitch of the humming
Not unlike
The pitch of the singing
Which came from the couple
Two stories up
Who sang opera
Which came down the walls
Which were thick and built
It would seem
Out of rubble
Except for the walls
Between rooms
We learned a hot day in July
The point of a screw emerging in our bedroom
From the pentagonal kitchen
Which looked out on the backyard
Where the beans I’d sowed
In mounds of earth
Were brutalized each night
By slugs or snails
Which roamed the plots
Especially after rain
Though it rained so little
The grasses bleaching yellow
Though summer had barely begun
Their bodies as long as fingers
And nearly translucent
Their undulations subtle
Yet
In increments
They crossed the subdivisions
We’d laid with bricks
In imitation of the squares we lived in
Which shared walls through which
We heard the neighbors fight
And then make up
And they heard us.
Sometimes I flung the slugs
Over the fence
Remorseless
Other times deciding
It would be cruelty to do so
Even if my flinging meant that briefly
The gastropod would fly
Even with the knowledge they’d return
Would penetrate the chain-link fence
To eat the waxen bean leaves
Young and doomed.
Once I even found a lone slug
In the foyer
And hunched to trace
Its gleaming trail of substance
Showing with precision
The path that it had traveled.
A slug is not
As you might think
A snail without a shell
A slug lives its whole life
Without a shell
Like I do
Scurrying across the street to weep
Before the woman singing
Outside the Rathaus Neukölln
Her low clear notes unearthly
In the morning rush
A sort of song
I’d never heard before.
Once it was a melody
I swore I knew
Which entered my apartment
So alluring
That I ran out to the balcony
Then pressed my ear against
The thick walls
Then the thin ones
But heard it clearest
In the middle of my bedroom
As if it was the air itself
That sang
And still
I make my stale ritual
Once a fortnight
Logging on my fake account
To watch the stories
Of a lover
From whom I’m estranged
Clicking through three years
To reach the present
Noting the deletion of my presence
Though not the images I filmed of her
Twirling in a crimson cape
As bells rang in the darkness
And in daylight
Spread-armed beside a flooded river
And the inking of a ginkgo leaf
That matches mine
Which we’d driven up to Köln to get
Three years ago last winter
Almost four.
Now I climb in nearly daily
And with utmost caution
To the bathtub
My great windfall
Though it is so small
I need to curl up fetally
To fit.
In the bath
I press my fingertips
Into the dome of flesh
I had become
Trying to find the hard sphere
Of the baby’s head
Then what the midwife called
The “little pieces”
By which she meant
The baby’s feet and hands.
In bed I scroll through monitors
With eyes of black glass
To see the baby from a distance
And in darkness
With technology
Developed by the British army
So in theory
I could watch the baby
While I drank a blood-orange cocktail
Down the street at Neue Republik
Which I’d deemed a needed if symbolic
Return to what I called
My life
The possessive my
Essential to the notion
That the sum of what I saw and felt
Belonged to me —
The leaves that fluttered
On the other side of gauze
I’d hung up in my bedroom
And the beam of sun
Which cut through and revealed
The hovering motes of dust
For a precise number of minutes
Which varied by the season
The blighted beans that I had planted
And the bricks
Laid into the street that I live on
Where the wall used to stand
Which I followed some mornings
As I walked alone
And the hands and feet
And the toes and fingers
Of my baby
As I saw them for the first time
And the singing —
That all of this
Was mine
Although it wasn’t.