Kathleen Winter

A Wish, a Preference, a Desire

In black and white but with exquisite precision, Hradĉany displayed
at a distance across the river, behind three slim trees intervening
in the foreground, the quarter’s consistent three- and four-story buildings,
a municipal park, a church with sugar bowl dome. Winter before snow;
Praha before the Great War. Another card features the castle itself
viewed from just across Rudolfina Bridge, with two skiffs skimming the Vltava,
two boaters in each, so small you can’t distinguish whether they’re children
or men, rich or weary. Inside castle walls St. Vitus asserts its gargoyled heights,
the buttresses invisible in this picture. A company of grayscale maples
fronts the façade of the castle, like a row of tiny explosions. Almost green,
the river’s wavelets are scales and it is a snake, sated and listless. Replete
might have said someone alive at the time. Both banks of the river and four
of its bridges appear in the last postcard. It’s possible to make out statues
on the Karlův Bridge, and the roof of one of the grand rectangular townhouse
blocks designed to safeguard a verdant lawn within its stone sides.
Across the city, domes and spires erupt by the hundreds, crests of agitated waves.
Delicate child of machinery and light, the photograph preserves even discrete
shingles, individual roof tiles, a boat drifting through one of the arches
of the nearest bridge. In this expansive cityscape a single, minute bicyclist
spins away up a narrow stone lane. Let this figure be the self in the poem.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review and Michigan Quarterly Review.  She was granted fellowships by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dora Maar House, James Merrill House and Cill Rialaig. Awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.