“Leave it to the Germans,” said Ben.
“They didn’t invent it,” I said. “They just named it.”
“To name a thing is to own it,” he said. “It’s theirs.”
And he walked away then,

waving goodbye with his
back to me, airily, triumphantly, the argument
won, the conversation over as
far as he was concerned. Though I don’t

dislike Ben exactly, nor envy him his
wife or Ph.D., which is in poetry—
the wife very pretty, beautiful even—when
a month later he tells me she told him she wants

out, I can’t help feeling—not joy
exactly, I wouldn’t call it Freude—
not the sort of feeling you’d write an ode to,
but more the sort you might

write a dark little conversational piece
in quatrains about—
just to say the conversation isn’t over
until it’s over.