(Photo by Rachel Cunningham)
(Click on picture to enlarge)
(This is a picture of my poem " Last Night at the Wursthaus" on the window of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Harvard Square ( Cambridge, Mass.) The Wursthaus is a now defunct eatery, much loved by locals and others.
Two friends I grew up with in Hyde Park used to go there once a week. They had no Cambridge or Ivy League connection, and the Wursthaus was just where they went after playing squash or basketball at the Hyde Park "Muni." They told me they sampled every beer on the menu. Their favorite was the "Augustiner-Bräu." This came in a squat, brown bottle, whose label showed a monk with hops. The monk looked serious about quality control, yet somehow relieved to be preoccupied with something wordly. It seemed the Wursthaus was fairly crowded, with tables packed fairly tight, though there was a looseness in the mix of people so admirably captured by the poem. The closest I ever came to recapturing this was at a beer garden in Prague, where my conversation with a German and a Czech escalated toward hostility until we all found harmony in admiration for Franz Kafka.
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