by Paul Hostovsky

 

He couldn’t speak a word of German.

She didn’t know any English. 

I could recite “Die Beiden” by Hugo von Hofmannsthal,

and my r’s were perfect drum rolls.

 

He was stationed at the American military base

in Mainz. She was the bartender. I was in 

my junior year abroad, studying German at the Goethe Institute.

But the fact that he was a soldier impressed her more

 

than my German and my Hofmannsthal and my Goethe 

put together. She poured him another Pilsener, 

leaned over the bar on her elbows, gave him 

her vertiginous cleavage, tittering as he downed the beer

 

in one long esophageal orgasm. This was

the extent of their communication: he drank,

she poured, he leered, she tittered. And then 

they went home together, I’d have bet my last

 

pfennig, at closing time. So what was the point

of poetry, what was the point of language itself, 

I asked myself between trochaic hiccups, 

tottering drunkenly back to my twin bilingual bed.