Language lessons (1982)
Heading north by auto-stop
out of Basel down the Rhine,
I’m picked up by a trucker Freiburg-bound.
My German isn’t bad but to me his accent’s strange
and shouting cross the engine makes it hard.
We chat a while quite amiably
about what I did and where,
then he passes me a beer and one for him.
I struggle for an age with the pliers he employs
till he shows me, single-handed, how it’s done.
Then he starts in on his story,
with the bottle in one hand,
how he should be on vacation with the wife
but, instead, he’d had to buy a headstone for their son.
I sympathise with caution, as one does.
It’s a touchy point of etiquette
how to make sure I heard right –
should I ask him how and when the young man died?
There’s a stage in language fluency when the major errors come
and all kinds of mixed-up wrangles are begun.
As I sat there questioning
how well I’d understood his speech,
it occurred to me that he was really drunk
and wondered just how reckless grief can make a man,
flying, tanked up, down the autobahn.