A couple of years ago, Annie and I were in Yugoslavia.
We had never been in Yugoslavia before.
We had gone to Europe.
We had done a lot of--
both of us done a lot of wandering around
before we were married, and now we go wandering around again,
only we wander in more places.
I suppose that's the significance of our getting
married.
We were going to be in Europe and we
heard from some very nice people in Yugoslavia
who asked us to come there.
There was a festival of writers.
I don't know if you've ever been in Yugoslavia.
We hadn't been there.
We didn't know quite what to expect,
although people wrote us very nice letters
before we came there.
But we had a hard time finding our way from--
we have had a hard time finding the Yugoslavian writers
in Belgrade, and then we had a hard time finding our way
from Zagreb to Belgrade.
But once we found the writers we flew through a wild rainstorm,
we woke in the morning and here's this most spectacular
place in Macedonia.
And it is, on the honest to God Macedon.
Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great was born there.
We woke in the morning and the place
was so spectacularly beautiful that we started
to avoid the literary conferences
between the Russians and the communists from Morocco,
and the rest and accepting the spirit of the Yugoslavians
who are very beautiful, very independent people,
we wandered around on our own.
We didn't know the language.
We had some French, German, and Italian available to us,
and people didn't want to admit that they knew German.
They knew it perfectly well.
Because the Germans were down there and--
well, I wouldn't admit that I knew Germany, either,
I tell them.
[LAUGHTER]
We took a walk one afternoon realizing
that we didn't know the language,
and the place where we stayed is called Lake Ohrid,
and it's way up in the mountains in the South Central Yugoslavia
in the province of Macedonia.
"Afternoon and Evening at Ohrid."
I walked with a browned woman in a time that grieved her.
The end of summer above blue water and the weeds
came out wondering to her about their names.
There was no one there to tell her,
in Serbo-Croatian, the names of that small flower song,
and so we had to keep our own words
in the vastness of that place.
And the dimness of mountains across the huge water
and my grieving love wondering about being alone
in the world, and my love's clear face.
How could I tell her about their clear names?
I did not know them.
I had to hold her that was all I had.
So I began.
This one is the sun blooded eye of a man who
drifted weeping downhill into water,
gathering gathering, the awake woman.
How are young lovers going to take their way and talk
together? ,
Well for the first time in my life, I shut up and listened.
Those little birds, eight singing
in a language that is strange to you and me.
So our love for them is a silly love, a sooth gathering
and ringing in a coil of snail shells.
The one thing that I most longed for to meet in the wildness
here was a spider.
I already knew my friends, the spiders, their mountains.
Every spider in America is the shadow
of a beautiful woman, shy, marveling at the architecture
of my own eyes.
I found the best spider here.
She spoke the best language, and it spins her face.
She wandered ahead of me, muttering to herself
that language of grief, the mountains and water
that are always a strange face, browned at the end of summer.
Ahead of me on the mountain path,
my brown love told me clearly, come to me
and love me clearly with the thinning shadow of the turtle.
I missed the turtle the first time I caught up with my love.
So we walked on.
Then we walked back.
Oh, you should have seen her.
My love said to me she was just going
home between one road and another,
and we don't even know in Serbo-Croatian
What is your name, I said.
I love you, she said.