The two of you, thirty-seven years married,
and only to one another, I should add --
some odd stone or metal for that, or medal --
arm in arm, old, stable (your new trick,
except at your age you don't learn new tricks,
more as if all your lives you'd understudied
age and stability), me buzzing round you
like an electron, first one side then the other,
the long walk by the concrete-bedded river,
the Sempt, whose tributaries arrive in pipes,
the heavy July whiff of river and linden,
low water, weeds, a few fish,
the ducks beside themselves at nightfall,
the unfailingly noisy dog and cherished for it,
the last remaining farm in the new suburb,
alteingesessen, a hayfield among garden plots,
all the way up to the quarry pool,
the gigantic activity of the new airport
racing day and night to completion like a new book,
and somewhere in it all, your tenderness
for a firefly.
Michael
Hofmann,
Approximately
Nowhere