Jennifer Foerster: I’m Jennifer Foerster, and this is PoetryNow. This poem came about when I returned to a place that I lived as a child, Vienna, Austria. There are so many crows in Vienna in autumn. The city is covered in crows. As I was walking around, I was kind of envisioning my younger self walking the streets. And I imagined if I were to run into her on the street what she would think of me now.

(READS POEM)

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.

* * *

When I was a kid, we would have great adventures all through the city, me and my friends. I miss that feeling of belonging. And also maybe that feeling of youth. The setting of this poem is in autumn. That’s when I was there. And it was cold and rainy. And I was remembering, as a kid, how wonderful the springtime was. I had two sets of French windows in my bedroom. And I remember in the spring I’d open the French windows and the lilacs would spill into the room. And I just felt this perfect happiness. So I was wandering around remembering that warmth and that sweetness of spring in this place where it’s autumnal and cold. I did feel autumnal. Kind of lonely and fading. (LAUGHS) Especially when I was thinking about where those dreams that I had went, and am I living them. And ironically I am. I was asked to return to this school that I went to as a kid to teach poetry. So I really was coming full circle and living a good dream that I imagined for myself. But sometimes when you’re in the midst of your life, you’re just not sure. Is this really me?

Katie Klocksin: That was Jennifer Foerster and her poem “The Other Side.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.