The Other Side

My crown. My room. Surrounding snow. These are not my hands, my winter shoes carried off by uncertain music. There was a meadow behind my house and if I should see myself there she would tell me there was never a meadow and then walk through me as if through a cloud and carry on in her own solitary direction. Crows still caw in her palace garden— tram rails, rain, stammering moon. Once lilacs bloomed their huge white knuckles breaking the winter of my room— it was a dream—French windows on a Viennese street. Every street I cross angling alongside smoggy postwar artifices branches scratch against my sleep. How my body was a branch in my sleep. And when I woke years later I peered down upon it leafless and stiff. No roosts left, no caw. No birds blooming in my dream’s green crooks. Afternoons alone are labyrinthine. I wander the city, searching for what? Friends, we knew where to find each other, tapping the window of the winter room. We were thinner then, younger than the chestnut trees. Everything has its seed much later and on the other side of time.