We sit awaiting the snowstorm the day after Christmas
upon the same sofa where we sat last night, lost
in our individual thoughts. “What are you thinking?”
she asks but I can not reply beyond a thin smile,
caught by a clear memory of a particular intersection,
where Slottsgränd meets Kungsängsgatan in Uppsala,
the streetscape in sunlight but unlinked to any event,
just a place I have been at different times: on the way
to the supermarket, to the station and thence to Stockholm,
or to Systembaloget, the state liquor store, for Ripasso;
or the time we went looking for vintage black-tie regalia,
stopping for sushi after none of the faded tailcoats fit.
None of this remarkable, save the vividness of the vision,
how it came to mind just after reading a meditation upon
the silence of god, and how happy it made me in aftermath,
the sense of an ordinary place upon this earth.