Library

Magda, whose full name
is Magdelena,
is not here.

Across the valley from
La Meige on this
cool summer evening,

she is sitting
at the edge of
a grassy cliff.

The only thing between
her and the air beneath
is a small, unlined
notebook she is filling
with consonant-heavy
Polish.

She will not tell me
what she is writing,
so I guess.

A poem?
No

Something about the chapel I can see in the distance?
No

Your thoughts?
Yes, kind of.

And I can imagine
she is writing something similar
to what we all write,
similar to what I am writing now:

that we are all human,
beautifully so…
terribly so…

That we are all
a great story of many books,
one that I see now,
brown hair, purple scarf,
her twin sister, Paulina, now beside her.

Two slim volumes in Polish
On the wide shelf of the earth.