Koenigsberg, My Kaliningrad
The dead,
naked, uncertain.
They sit amongst the headstones with their suitcases,
wonder why they've been chased into the graveyard,
what it is they're waiting for.
Tram number ten
to Tolstikova 15-2, the Deima Hotel in Kaliningrad,
prices and names subject to change,
Marx bust in the lobby. Nondescript men
sidle by with offers of Danziger Goldwasser,
slip cheap vodka into pockets instead.
Robberies that never end,
the luggage of the heart forced open again,
plundered until nothing is left
but a room with an unfamiliar view.
Single bed, dresser, table with two chairs,
toilet/shower down the hall,
metal peephole door.
It's hard to know what one eye sees,
who or what stands on the other side
and robs us of our memories. Every death
is terrifying because of its anonymity.
Get up. Get up and walk.
One by one, we stumble awake,
strain against the dark, a feeling
something is lost.
We've already forgotten everything
except to go as quickly as we can,
leave what's certain behind.
Headstones upended, unlocked.
The graveyard empty now.
The moon,
Teutonic, folded in half,
tucked into an envelope bordered in black.
Such skies are seldom good news.
Higher Up
Here
wind is a moving meditation,
a listening, hollow as a hole
dug into the hillside of memory.
And memory beaked, raven-tongued.
We hear it cawing at our backs,
don't turn around. We've already left
the trees behind, are becoming unbranched,
leafless, the blackened stumps of a fire
that burned itself out two years ago.
The path just instinct now,
broken grass stems, a small lake on a map,
rock overgrown with lichen: hooded bone,
devil's matchstick, sulphur stubble.
It's becoming clear we know the way,
but can't find it. Higher up a cave
where something hears its name
and stirs from a long sleep, rises
from its bier, huge, humpbacked,
hungry.
Broken Off
The path to that landscape broken off now,
that bright path cut out of the forest,
wide enough for a Teutonic knight, a lance held sideways.
Vertically a sign of peace; horizontally, war.
Germany's famous son, Thomas Mann, spoke via radio from California,
said everything must be paid for,
the southern wing of Exeter Cathedral, the monastery buildings
of Canterbury,
the silent V2s rockets launched at the English countryside.
Their existential effect.
Meschede, at the confluence of the Ruhr and Henne,
a convent dedicated to St. Walburga. The small marketplace,
its slated half timbered buildings. A ten minute footnote.
(20,000 incediary sticks, 250 phosphorus canisters)
At Lubeck, Church of St. Mary, Church of St. Peter.
And the Old School, a jewel with its dark green glazes
and longitudinal façade with fifteen axes.
One hundred forty minutes needed for that lesson to be learned.
There would be others,
but finally Thomas Mann agreed.
Some ideas fail.
Even those repeated for the thick headed:
Cologne 262 times, Essen 272, Duisburg 299.
In Danzig, not one single spire.
St. Joseph's, St. Catherine's, St. Ignatius, St. James, St. Johns,
etc.
The hulls of ships carved into church floors no longer sailed
their resurrections.
Scrolled cornices toppled street after street like the landed
gentry.
History reduced to paper and prayer, combustible,
a charcoal country inhospitable to man,
unable to support memory.
Pray for us Knights of St. Mary, Ordo domus Sactae Mariae,
protect us from ourselves. Pull on your white surcoats,
black crosses, collect the tolls that allow us to pass.
Quickly now. Before all the cathedrals of the air are torn down,
their illuminated windows, pastel Baroque angels,
rococo smiles. Quickly,
before we forget the way through the forest,
the ash path that leads back to the bunkers.
A Cannibalized Man
The staggered pulse of a man
who uses a very little bit of space in the world,
an eighth of a king size bed, oatmeal in the morning, small, small
sips of air
and last night's coffee reheated in the micro-wave, cream, two
sugars.
A cannibalized man,
walking bone
heel to hip,
tarsal to temporal.
Your mother's bitterness at the way life ends, unable to say
a single thank you
or tell you who your father was.
A cancerous growth the shape and size of a large field stone,
her heart's desire birthed as another child
naked and mewling at her left breast. You touched it
after she died, drew your hand back quickly,
this deformed lachrymal son made from her flesh,
her blood,
cold and stopped now.
And your blood. His,
whoever he was. Type O.
Still flowing. Stubborn.
Your heart a ruined building torn down in six places.
What can we hope for when a mother births you through the side
door,
lets you out to play in the empty lot next door,
popsicle crosses and dandelions.
What can we hope for,
what all-mightiness, what genius, what, what
when you believe she meant it
when she wished you dead.
It's taken you this long, my dear man,
to understand your broken days are almost at an end.
What you don't realize
the heart is amphibious, adaptable.
It wants and wants more than it should,
beats longer than we believe possible.
