On the day
that I put away my winter clothes in the morning
and was obliged to take them out again at night,
I listened to a soft-spoken man talk on the radio
in a language that I did not understand,
then explain to me, in English,
that he was talking about silence.
He could not say “th” properly,
it always came out as “ze.”
I wanted to know
whether that came from speaking Hebrew,
or whether his tongue had already been soldered hard
when he was brought out of Germany at eleven; so hard
that sixty years later, he still spoke
as if he had never left,
and the sixty years had taken away nothing.

When he finished speaking, he went back to his language
as if he were again by himself.
I shook out the winter coat
that I had thought I no longer needed, today being April,
and hung it in the closet,
swept up the dust that had settled in the course of the day,
all the time listening,
all the time listening.
As if I had sat at his feet since morning,
having chosen the better part.