Читать книгу Parallax - Maureen Mulhern - Страница 10

Die Forelle

Tucked between the pages of “The Trout”

An unopened letter, postmarked April.

It’s late September now; six months

This letter has lain next to the trout’s song

Whose notes, like liquid hooks and tiny

Whittled spines, squirmed impatiently

For resuscitation and gravity to release them

Up. The notes swam like tadpoles

Between miniature lightning bolts, straying

Telephone poles, ascending b b b b b’s,

A few upside-down golf clubs,

Others with the curve of high-heeled shoes,

Legs and eyes of insects, dangling, not quite

Fully assembled. All the while the letter remained

Jammed between the pages

Like a silent tongue. In dated language,

The refrain, with lilting, false naïveté, sang

Of how the trout will “never be taken

Tho’long he persevere.” I wondered for a moment

About the sender of the letter, of the letter

Itself, which by now had taken on a life

Of diminished singularity, and all the reasons

Why it had been left

Unopened in the death song of a trout.

Out of some vague, distant, atavistic

And not yet defined respect,

I took that letter home, mailed it

And as if it had anything to do with me,

I watched it drift away

Like a fish or a refugee, not knowing

The circumstances of how it would be received

And brought back

Once again into this scrambled world.