KAREN’S HOUSE

I’m visiting your museum north of Copenhagen,
not far from where I was brought up myself.
And I walk in your footsteps like so many others,
sensing the raging sadness in the walls of your mind.

I admire those African drums that yanked your soul
out of Europe, the colonial zebra skins,
that grandmotherly furniture from a stoic age.
A year ago, I began to understand your tales
in a way I hadn’t before. When I read you now,
you’re breathing through the prose, taking my fictional
hand in yours, half-angel, half-witch, as you were in life
and now in death.

In your museum, you come alive in unexpected ways.
It’s early spring, a pale sun is melting the grass.
There are only a few visitors and you’re not pleased.
Now you point me toward an unknown poem
and a drawing of an Italian Doge you made in art school
when you were a little girl. I stare at the Venetian ruler,
a Doge I’ve dreamed of myself. Now goosebumps race
through my body as if they want to show me
how connected we are in ways we don’t understand.

In your garden, a thin grey line leads over the pond
and into a small wood where you were laid to rest
sixty years ago. The timid colors of spring are green and sage;
a rare stork returns from the south and lands on a Scandinavian
lawn that is pregnant with magical tales. Do the naked beech trees
pass the stork test, or will she return to the African highlands
and find a farm to her liking?

Once more a writer and a reader become one
in the silence that makes a mockery of time.

To Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen