Theodore Weiss

Once in late summer,
the road already deep in twilight,
mixing colors with some straggly
wildflowers, I came to a village
I did not know was there
until
I stepped into its narrow street.
Admiring the prim, white houses

... who can bear the idea of Eternal Recurrence? I

Even as you went over, Nietzsche,

for Yehuda Amichai Though you live in a little country,
crammed and crisscrossed with debris,

I

The students, lost in raucousness,
caught as by the elder Breughel’s eye,
we sit in the college store
over sandwiches and coffee, wondering.
She answers eagerly: the place was fine;
sometimes the winds grew very cold,
the snows so deep and wide she lost

Some seventy years later
your father, sitting at your table
over wine he savors, last rays mellow-
ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt,
Rifka.
“Just naming her shoots
rifles off again inside the morning
square, rifles she aimed into the air

The amities of morning
and the buxom habits of birds
that swing a bell-bright city
in their intelligent wings;

last night’s squall has
drawn off like anger’s tide,
the remote and muffled waters
beating solitudinous rocks

“Your great-grandfather was . . .”

And Mrs. C, our tart old Scots
landlady, with her stomping legs,
four bristles sprouted from her chin-
wart, she who briskly
chats away
about Montrose, founder of her clan,
as though she’s just now fresh

“I busy too,” the little boy
said, lost in his book
about a little boy, lost
in his book, with nothing

but a purple crayon
and his wits to get him out.
“Nobody can sit with me,
I have no room.

Framed by our window, skaters, winding
in and out the wind, as water reeling
so kept in motion, on a well-honed
edge spin out a gilded ceiling.

Fish, reflecting glow for glow,
saints around the sun, are frozen
with amazement just one pane below.

Skates flash like stars, so madly