along with one more morning in Berlin with Tanya, an hour
of pigeons rising around you, lilacs wrapped in news
stories, a minute at the barricades, another riding
on your father’s shoulders through the garlic fields, even cigarettes
left over from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook, a pen full of ink, and that short
poem by Hölderlin you loved, so you could go up in smoke
together: you, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Hölderlin.
In the aftermath, you are emulsion on paper, a corpse listening beneath
the ground to a train passing through a polaroid of clouds.
It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.
Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice.
SANCTUARY
Ce voyage, je voulais le refaire—
This journey, I would like to make again—
Light pealed, bell-like, through the canopy. Long ago or seems so.
Then the ghost of a deer and crows flapping through smoke.
She made a poultice for me of herbs and mud to suck the poison from the boil.
And then she went into a mahogany coffin. As there were then.
Mornings, horses cantered through ground fog having broken loose.
So I would go out for them, bridles in hand, with no one awake.
The closer I came to them, the further they moved away.
Following them through the clouds is a journey I would make again.
UNINHABITED
night moaning in an open flue
wings along the chimney wall
the house as it was, as winter drew
frost’s white face on the glass
and you, as then you were
as old as you would ever be,
playing Schubert in the air,
on the invisible keys
of a piano that wasn’t there—
for the one who vanished near Voronezh
for “shovels of smoke in the air”
for the wristwatch missing in the river
from the walker who slipped from the edge
for a suitcase left in the Pyrenees
for spectacles crushed at Portbou
for the shawl of stars that was night
when the last of them spoke to you.
CLOUDS
A whip-poor-will brushed
her wing along the ground
a moment ago, fifty years
in the orchard where my father
kept pear and plum,
a decade of peach trees
and Antonovka’s apples
whose seeds come
from Russia by ship
under clouds islanding
a window very past
where also went
the soul of my mother
in a boat with blossoming
sails like apple petals
in wind fifty years at once.
PASSAGE
a boat in snow
a boat with a cargo
of refuse moored on a field
water chiming into a bowl
the long hum of a gong in wind
and from the sickroom a death rattle
a falling back as if through clouds
someone in the room
seen only by the dying one
there, just there, in the room
in the past, the window sash raised,
the curtain flared
as a girl’s skirt in wind
there would be a pitcher
of water on the night table—
some kind of game the children
would be playing would be heard
like a call from tree to tree
during apple harvest
LIGHT OF SLEEP
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks, and the zoetrope
disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster,
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.