WISDOM

What was a mountain and afterward air and later a star；

and he who said “Thank you”─said it softly so that

neither the two nor the third might hear it, because they were very

angry；

they were throwing their shoes out of the window, their flower pots,

their gramophone records, their water glasses and their napkins

that we might get angry too, that we might shout at them “Don’t!”

and thus give them an excuse for what they’d already done.

In the room next door, with its large iron bed,

we can hear the old man coughing；on his blanket

he has placed a small frog, and for days and nights now,

calm, fasting, ecstatic, he stares at and studies

the soft mechanisms of the frog’s leaping.

Afterward he stops coughing. We hear him jumping on the bed.

On the third day we encased him completely in plaster,

leaving only his toothless grin showing.