Ravens came today.
I mailed a letter, drove
into town.  Now a saxophone, now
a poem about the Spanish Civil War
by Machado:

   "The mother, her forehead dark
between a day gone and a day to come,
sees a fire nearly out
and an oven with spiders".*

Now a correspondence.

The dog next door
rain into our yard, threatening
my husband's patients.

I made a soup from chicken bones,
with barley, shitake mushrooms, kale.

I heard a voice: You had another life
in the Shoah, you were a little girl
brought to the slaughter..."

I saw a vision - a spark of blue light.
A man in a fur hat surrounded by a halo.

I didn't tell a soul.




*from the book "Against Forgetting", from the poem "Rainbow At Night" translated by Robert Bly