Poem: Death Fugue (Echo) after Stefan George

In wind’s web

Was my fate,

In trauma’s eye,

In only a smile

As you gave

At moist midnight

When your glance ignited.

Now Mays drone on:

Now I grieve only

For your eyes and hair

All day

In always longing,

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

From “Girly Man” (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Charles Bernstein is author of “Recalculating” (University of Chicago Press, 2013), “Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions” (Chicago, 2011) and “All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).