A Poem

On Listening to Carolyn Forche Read Poetry
in a Bar in Prague, 1995
(Beth Kephart)

Because in Prague I was nothing but wanting
with words and still recovering from new sin,
and because the bar was also dark and lamped
by the yellow of your hair, you made me believe
in the running for the heart of a poem,
the superceded shush between memory and maw.

It was how you read, how you resurrected
Terrence, how the sand in the wind of your words
caught out the knots in my hair.
It was how you riddled me almost
clean with possibility.
I was sitting with my son.
I was sitting beside my husband.
You were — may I use the word? — explicit.

In the same way that a stone wall falls
more sensationally than it stands,
in the same way that a rescued love
is made more tender by its damage,
in the same way that women understand beauty
only in its passing, you in the bar in Prague
blew smoke up through the crevices of language.
Smoke the color of angel wings.
Poetry as salvation.