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.
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Michael Joyce’s poems and translations have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, FOLLY, Gastronomica, The Iowa Review, Metamorphoses, AGNI, New Letters, nor/, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West, Spoon River Review, New Review, Or (Otis Review), The Common, and THE SHOp (Cork). His book-length sequence of poems, Paris Views, was published by BlazeVOX in 2012. (updated 4/2012)