Lost While Translating
There’s this woman I’m reading.
No, that’s not right.
There’s a woman –
open like a book.
Still not it.
Her heart an ancient text.
My heart the devouring eyes.
No.
There’s a woman,
she has words like no one,
sentences like never,
a woman I lost like a train
for a faraway land.
Not what I mean.
In English, you say,
What are you reading?
Rarely who.
There was a woman,
and I kept reading
what I’d been reading before.
—Sandra Alland
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previously published in Proof of a Tongue (McGilligan Books, 2004)