after John Ashbery
 
What could I say of a young Polish woman that January?
I was barely a year into college, on my first time abroad, 
 
felt out of my depth. She worked the hotel dining room,
met me for coffee to practice English. My words faltered.
 
What could I say about watching London snow, first time
in 33 years, orange juice cartons cooling on a window sill,
 
drivers skidding white roads gray? Not about the Jameson’s
I downed in Windsor—the morning a chilled side of beef,
 
and me feeling hung on a freezer hook. After it, I reeled
a good part of the afternoon but stayed warm. Didn’t tell
 
a soul about Stratford-upon-Avon, where two Bobbies
tailed me—streets empty, shop windows dark, me feeling
 
the bottle of red wine drunk with dinner and deathly afraid
of a tourist trip of jail. Didn’t mention the trip to Wales—
 
hung over, I yearned for a deluge long as five summers
to wash Wordsworth and Tintern Abbey down a mountain
 
brook. As if nouns were stones, torn from cathedral walls
to drop and envelop me—a collapse followed by stillness.

	after John Ashbery
 
—steps I take again, feeling a stone column’s weight
my one full day alone in England. I went to Coventry

to take in the apocalypse of the place—the cathedral

blitzed into ruin and the new building built alongside,
all brick and long rectangles of stained glass. Only now,

40 years later, can I appreciate the quiet there, as water

taking so long to percolate into a baked soil not unlike
the old building’s floor, a fire-polished mirror. A spire

pointed a Gothic finger to where the Luftwaffe brought

hell, in a war long burnt away. Another struggle roiled
inside me, the lack of words to express it like the town’s

water mains, bomb shattered, as flames spun a vacuum

that sucked away thought and oxygen. An askew cross,
charred beams, graced a heat-bleached altar. Behind it,

the words Father Forgive. I had no idea how to ask it

for myself. And I still don’t. How do you ask yourself
to erase how you were born—blaze and ashes framed

by fissured walls, cracked traceries? It doesn’t fall away,

like the statue of Saint Michael standing over the devil,
spear in hand and wings full spread. It’s another statue,

one of reconciliation, at a corner of the ruin—a man

and woman on their knees, hugging one another tight,
holding for all it’s worth—for all the steps and scars—