How you loved to read in the snow and when your face turned to water from the internal heat combined with the heavy crystals or maybe it was reversus you went half-blind and your eyelashes turned to ice the time you walked through swirls with dirty tears not far from the rat-filled river or really a mile away—or two—in what you came to call the Aristotle room in a small hole outside the Carnegie library.
Copyright © 2010 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the author.