Summary

Theory of Memory - - first person, past tense / single stanza (paragraph), prose poem. The speaker describes a visit to a fortune teller, made long before becoming “a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments” (18). The fortune teller revealed that the speaker had a great and powerful future. And yet, the fortune teller also said, the speaker was still a child: everything else was just possibilities.

A Sharply Worded Silence – first person, past tense / multiple stanzas, blank verse. The speaker introduces the narrative of his conversation with a wise, mysterious old woman by placing it in its setting: in a park called The Contessa’s Garden, the speaker returning home from a job in a factory making wooden toys, a job taken in the aftermath of a broken relationship. The woman speaks of wandering through the park every day, some...