Travel talkat the Country Women's AssociationFor my mother1.You asked for so little, I agreed:a talk for your oldest friends — craftswomen;makers of gingerbread, jam rolls, winged cupcakes;sponsors of good works at home and abroad.The topic: Austria. Though my visit therehad been years before, I felt jetlagged,in a dead-meat tiredness. Fronting upwith notes desperately cribbed from Go EuropeI knew I'd found the right place: a poster of alps,travel books heaped high; and, dangling from a hookbehind where I would stand, some lederhosen.I so wanted not to disappoint,tried to translate myself, bumbled throughlike Joseph Cotton in The Third Man.2.At question time, someone asked ifthe streets had been full of water. I took a detour,punted us all down gold canals shimmeringwith cupolas, pink-marble facades.The spread was, but of course, revelatory.There were Danish pastries — scenes from Aarhussped past my eyes — and scones, still warm,crowned with glorious jam and glorious cream.(I'd often travelled through Devonshire.)That whipped cream, and the meringue abovelemon heaven, shone like snow on alpsas, to avoid small talk, I ate furiously,believing I could hear — like some phantomecho within my mind — the sound of music.Eyewear1.I've kept — for well-intentioned years that stretchedto decades — the glasses that tracked our eyes' journeys.I handle, first, the hard cases — a lacqueredred, and black, a coppery rose; squeezespring-mouthed sheaths of vinyl, grey or navy,and this one, yours, a tapestried pouch.Inside them, plastic frames — floridlywinged; squarely wide-eyed — too uncoolto rate as retro. The lenses rimmed with gold,with titanium, slide out easily —small, intellectual. Will each pair find a matchwhen sent to Zambia, say, or Laos? —someone ready to embrace a strange and boldclarity, her gaze framed in a surprise.2.We looked at each other across roomsin these relics — behind masking glazes,how many untold stories? And there were timeswhen it seemed I was known utterly —that held gaze sustaining asa hand pressed against the spine. We traversedthe last, shared years with pragmatic grace,growing more, and less, short-sighted together.Near the end, you left off wearing glasses,believed you saw better without them.Who was I to contest that? We watchedTV programs, differently.But the window birds stayed the same for you,quick in the vine rooted beneath the house.The last yearIn answer to his words, the cliff opened its mouth — it yawned — it gaped.Where there had been solid