As it is I can make only ill-informed assumptions about the roles of flexibility and clarity in one language or another, and absolutely no assumptions about the greater efficacy of either. I am forced to take pride in small remembrances – suddenly I know the word for toe or forgiveness or candle and hope that I will one day have learned and relearned enough to foster a healthy habit of linguistic hopskotch. I have taken charge of my sister’s library card so that I can borrow Amerikanishe Lyrik and muddle through secondhand Longfellow, and I listen to too much Einstürzende Neubauten. In a track on ‘Silence is Sexy’ they say in English: Your arms would not be able to stretch as far as necessary to form an adequate gesture for beauty.

This is how I feel about the intricacies of human communication, and the color of the butter’s rim when it’s been left out too long, and the candles that have started glowing through the condensation on evening windows. There are songs gestating in the raw spot between my belly and my lungs that could one day deserve translation. And with all the beauty, and the wearing my boots into scrap leather, there is something that still extends outward. Today I walked past a rank of needled trees that to some people might smell of Christmas – to me it smelled of the playground in the Geiberg woods when I was growing up, and that nauseous satisfaction of swinging on your stomach for a little too long. It was the kind of olfactory experience that makes you howl a little in the back of your throat because you can taste home there. It is the same when I smell under-watered lawns and splinters baking in old decks, and bay fog. We do not howl for a loss; it is a greeting. I belong to these things more than they belong to me, and I feel like it is possible to be in all the important places at once if I am not running away. I use English to best explain this thing that is happening to the trees in Germany. My whole life I have said shrank instead of cupboard. These things find me.

eight-oh-twelve in the evening. november thirteenth. two-thousand-nine.

It is sunny. the patios are wafting hot wood smell. I am reading Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy for the first time. My copy has been translated into German as Rastlose Nähe, or Restless Nearness. I am thinking it is a nice thing, to understand which things make my life larger to me than those in the novels I read, and to feel a happiness unmarried to complacency. Nowadays I like to reread the dated, quiet things I have written; they are hopeful, seeking stories, when before all the dated, quiet things were made of fear and refusal.

three-forty-three in the afternoon. may third. two thousand ten.