4.07 - Munich

My last day in Munich was a good one: warm and sunny. I rode my bicycle for most of the late morning. Having finished Timbuktu yesterday, I started out with an errand: trying to find the English bookstore I'd seen yesterday near the University. When I finally found it, all the prices were quite expensive. However, I asked the lady working there if she knew about any used English language bookstores, and there happened to be one just a five minute bike ride west on Schellingstrasse. Called 'The Readery', the store was run by a nice couple from Durham, NC who had just started it up only five or six months prior, upon finding only a total absence of used English bookstores in Munich. Even this place ended up being a bit expensive, but I wanted to give them some business, and I needed something to read. I bought a double version of Jacob's Room and the Waves by Virginia Woolf, and a book of poetry called Seeing Things, by Seamus Heaney. I've never read much of his stuff, but it looked interesting, and I find it pretty key to always have a good book of poetry around.


I rode to the English Gardens where I found a Texas fiddler, with a German drummer and bassist, playing some bluegrass. I rolled a joint and sat down under a tree and smiled broadly into Heaney's poems. Here's one I really like:


'Field of Vision'
by Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with the backs to wind and
rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate --
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.