A Poem
Because I saw you once in an old forgotten barn,
on the edge of a wood
with tall grass growing wild in the foreground,
through the grainy lens of a Russian film
the dark light captured in a European vestige
that no one lives in
except the air that has been collecting cultures
for thousands of years
and leaving them quietly
to whisper in the moving grass.
I recognized you then
in the wooden architecture of a window frame
at dusk
the glass like melting sugar
over a small table with chairs
in an empty and darkening room
I could see in there,
in this demonstration of what isn’t visible,
the knowledge of a lover who maybe just didn’t exist
So then when we found each other
and were both neither old nor young,
I saw in your face what the wind was saying in the grass
And felt in our skin what the window reveals: that existence is timeless.
I saw why the barn had seemed full with nothing in it
and the tall grass was not lonely from having been abandoned
And I knew how to regard ourselves:
like passing histories
like the ones we both come from
which, once their players and deeds are gone,
still saturate the Earth and sky.
Jennifer Ammann. June 2015.