Am Bodensee

Robert Schumann

1.

This close to the border it shouldn’t

have mattered, her sudden lapse,

the strange resignation. Even the wind

from the west seemed loose

and easy, sweeter somehow, as if

baggy in its molecules. After all,

she was eight miles (just eight miles)

from Lake Constance, the Bodensee, the boat

she was sure to find, passage she could

surely purchase for the price of her family’s

silver, her mother’s ruby bracelet.

Perhaps she didn’t mean to do it, an action

like instinct in reverse, the swift river

beneath the bridge, the Alps draining

in early spring, snowpack loosened

by a week of warmth. Her child

was swept away before a cry could dent

the still-cool air, a cry she couldn’t afford.

It was all shutting down she’d heard, the lake

held in silence these days, the ss just listening

more than anything. “You should hear it,”

a man had told her. “What?” “Nothing.

Not a sound.” So how could she take a baby across?

This close to spring and Switzerland, to her

sister, who’d left early and easily, this close

to escape and an end to silence, she heard instead

her daughter slip into it completely.

2.

Did she follow her child into the river,

barter what was left on the banks of the lake?

Did she scream until they heard and came?

The mother of my children says I need them

too much, that I rely on the small sounds

they make as they sleep. She says

it isn’t healthy. So I am trying to imagine

a choice I couldn’t make, and then imagine

past it. If we are made of memory,

if history can save us, then why not

remember one life among the many

thrown away, simply thrown away?

Does it matter if I’ve made her up?

Is there anything worse, really, than what’s

happened, what’s happening now.

So I rely on them too much.

But does memory end at the edge

of every imagined memory?

She threw her baby in the river,

then walked the rest of the way to the lake

in silence. Her sister never heard from her.