Wie im himmel so auf erden as in heaven so on earth.
Wer ist unser gott? who is our god?

A sign behind the black-windowed Reichstag reads “these are the last days.”

Breaking holes in the wall, they found nothing.
The homeless squatters passed through the holes into empty communist gardens,
       and the people from the east passed from their side
       into a world unbearable to them.

XXVI

Storm light, bare orchards, the heavens briefly open.
My heart flew to his roof.

We returned here after the war whose lives the war took.

Last summer a wind from Byelorussia brought us blue roses.

Something was wrong with the milk.
Yellow brooks of waste lit the hayfields.

XXVII

If you ask them anything they go on telling you the same thing forever.
Not what happened, but what may happen.
Death understood as death.
The world in its worlding.
Our hope put into question.
Figures dead and alive
       whispering not truth but a need for truth when one word is many things.

XXVIII

They’ve made a shrine in hissing rain to Jan Palach near where four men are starving
   themselves to death.
These are the zones of refuse: that dream, and the train taking us,
       a bell ringing in my spine.

Every epoch bears its own ending within itself.
Fields of rape, canola fields, the white-eyed, walking dead.

So the cry is cut from its stalk.

PART III

The Recording Angel

I

Memory insists she stood there, able to go neither forward nor back, and in that
Unanimous night, time slowed, in light pulsing through ash, light of which the coat was
   made
Light of their brick houses
In matter’s choreography of light, time slowed, then reversed until memory
Held her, able to go neither forward nor back
They were alone where once hundreds of thousands lived

Doves, or rather their wings, heard above the roof and the linens floating
Above a comic wedding in which corpses exchange vows. A grand funeral celebration
Everyone has died at once
Walking home always, always on this same blue road, cold through the black-and-white
   trees
Unless the film were reversed, she wouldn’t reach the house
As she doesn’t in her memory, or in her dream
Often she hears him calling out, half her name, his own, behind her in a room until she
   turns
Standing forever, where often she hears him calling out

He is there, hidden in the blue winter fields and the burnt acreage of summer
As if, in reflecting the ruins, the river were filming what their city had been
And had it not been for this lines up behind if it weren’t for that
Until the past is something of a regiment
Yet looking back down the row of marching faces one sees one face
Before the shelling, these balconies were for geraniums and children
The slate roofs for morning