Poetry reading

She told me she was hanging around in the place where there was nothing left to say.

I said, that sounds like you.

The place is hard to find, she said, but once you get there it's a pretty cool space. There's mineral water and the beers are two dollars.

When I got there people were just milling around. I didn't know any of them, so I started sorting them out into landowners and farmers, teachers and students, Marxists and
capitalists, boys and girls.

I moved a chair to the back of the room so I could leave early if I wanted. Everyone thought I was rude but I didn't care. After all I was the listener, I could do as I pleased.

When she started to read she started to become a poet. I mean everything then was in her voice, the whole world, every word was being born and was then dying and being born once more as she read her poems, going from poem to poem so that I couldn't tell where one began and one ended.

I couldn't hear everything, as I was in the back of the room and she read so softly. I heard enough to be satisfied, then left silently, so as not to disturb anything, before the end of her reading.