And this is Museum.
On the morning of the Käthe Kollwitz exhibit,
a young man and woman come into the museum restaurant.
She is carrying a baby.
He carries an air-freight edition of the Sunday New York
Times.
She sits in a high-backed wicker chair cradling
the infant in her arms.
He fills a tray with fresh fruit, rolls,
and coffee in white cups and brings it to the table.
His hair is tousled, her eyes are puffy.
They look like they were thrown down into sleep
and then yanked out of it like divers coming up for air.
He holds the baby.
She drinks coffee, scans the front page, butters a roll,
and eats it in their little corner in the sun.
After a while, she holds the baby.
He reads the Book Review and eats some fruit.
Then he holds the child while she
finds the section of the paper she wants and eats
fruit and smokes.
They've hardly exchanged a look.
Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with
this equitable arrangement.
And with the baby who cooperates by sleeping.
All around them are faces Käthe Kollwitz
carved in wood of people with no talent or capacity
for suffering who are suffering the numbest kinds of pain--
hunger, helpless terror.
But this young couple is reading the Sunday paper in the sun.
The baby is sleeping, the green has
begun to emerge from the rind of the cantaloupe,
and everything seems possible.
That was a prose poem.
And it was a prose poem because I was trying to--
it almost never happens to me that I
see something and then think I'm going to write a poem about it.
The language comes to me.
But in this case, I had seen that and it struck me.
And trying to write about it, I kept
having trouble with finding a verse form for the hands
back and forth.
And I thought, well, the hell with it.
Just write it out.
And then when it was a kind of clear, rhythmic paragraph,
I thought, OK, this [INAUDIBLE].
Then I thought, I can write prose poems, so I--
and the one thing I knew about the convention of the prose
poem was it wasn't supposed to sound too much like prose.
So I started trying to see.
And I like the first sentence of this one
because it sounded so much like prose.
And indeed it was.