Today I found a poem I'd copied out longhand from The New Yorker, Aug 23 & 30, 1999, when it was new. Here is what it says.

The Purification of Space for Dorothy

She has hair the color of rust.

She wears a red dress

and three watches:

one for her daughter in California,

one for her daughter in New York,

and one for her sister in Scotland.

She smokes cigarette after cigarette.

She takes lithium and tells everyone,

"Love, and do what you want."

She listens to the same play on the radio

and tries to convince me

that Ibsen is American.

"He was like me, of course.

he can't be anything else."

She has a love who works for God, she says.

"I've never met him,

so I wear this red dress

so he will recognize me

and know I am the fire."

I pretend not to understand her.

I pretend I'm in a hurry

when she asks me, almost silently,

"What do you do

up in your apartment:

do you laugh or do you cry?"

I would like to answer her.

I would like to take her hand with three watches

and caress her

as if she were an orphan,

but she is on fire.

Below our mailboxes,

each morning,

she leaves a cup full of coffee,

a pack of cigarettes,

and, near them, a card which says,

"Live your life in beauty.

I leave these so you may partake,

as if in the body and the blood of Christ."

When she meets me running up or down the stairs,

she says the same thing:

"Fly if you want, but don't run.

God loves us all,

but those who fly he loves the most."

Quietly, Dorothy with rusty hair

and dress red as fire

sings,

"Raspberries ripen only in summer,

only when I dream of my love,"

and she shows me her empty wallet.

"Everything I touch turns to gold," she says,

"then into silver, then into tears."

It's by Lillian Ursu and it's translated from Romanian by Ursu and Bruce Weigl.