April 17th (ii):

Source: Collins, Billy. Poetry. 2nd ed., vol. 193, Poetry Foundation, Nov. 2008.

This poem came from a magazine I chose out of a stack of editions offered to me by a woman in the Center for Translation Studies two weeks ago. The office sits in the corner of a curved hallway on the quiet top most floor of Jonssen (twice I confused it for Green Hall on the sky bridge), and the woman had been transcribing an email while an old German professor (who I interviewed for 60 minutes once five years ago) dictated. I doubt he recognized me, but his blue eyes were uncannily discerning and his questions to me more so. I think anyone over 85 is like that though. Is wisdom housed in the eyes? Or maybe a bullshit detector. Anyway, he made me nervous, so I quickly selected this edition (alongside three others) because I liked its cover, a girl with chainmail hair colored in yellow, backed by blue.

This morning, I flipped through the book on a whim and stopped on page 116, caught by a word, reeled line by line, left to right, top down, recognizing the commonality of suburban life everywhere (even 17 years ago; form determining function I guess), but then the image of the words became more specific, they described my morning exactly, and I was astonished. The clicking, the workmen next-door, the tile, the language. Okay fine, so it wasn't exactly exact. It was three men not two, stone slabs not tile, and I didn't understand what they were saying. Approximately exact but close enough. Close enough that it felt almost magical to have read this poem when I did. I want to use a fake posh word like serendipity, but I think what I really felt was the sense that the world belongs to me and I belong to the world.