I

The hand moves across the page of its own accord.
The first years are a yellow field, and a child singing through her crib bars.
Yours, the windblown canola between the curtain and hope. Mine, the languor of
       peony in a time unknown to us.
You wanted only to retrieve a few invisible souvenirs:
       words spoken by coals in a tile oven,
       empty iron benches wrapped in snow.

Anna said we were all to be sent: Poles, Romanians, Gypsies.
So she drew her finger across her throat.

II

Anna stands in a ring of thawed snow, stirring a trash fire in an iron drum until her face
       flares, shriveled and intent, and sparks rise in the night along with pages of
   burning
       ash from the week’s papers,
       one peeling away from the rest,
an ashen page framed in brilliance.

For a moment, the words are visible, even though fire has destroyed them, so
       transparent has the page become.
The sparks from this fire hiss out among the stars and in thirty years appear
       as tracer rounds.

They didn’t want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it.

III

Smoke wrote from its fire something brief
       in the city of what could be said.
As if a cemetery were a field of doors. Requia crying against the walls. Little roofs of
   moonlight.
The ecstasy of standing outside oneself—

Anna said “carry this” and “follow behind me.”
The earth is tired and marked, human after human.

IV

So we are going back, to the invisible railyard shed and the poppy-seed cakes.
Anna, coal-eyed in a field of bone chips.

When you were born a steamed pot lid was shaken over your face to provide tears for a
   lifetime.
       This is why you have such happiness no matter what.
Were these the animals of your village? Pigs, goats, geese, a few cows?

Pigs with their throats cut. Goats eating flowers. Crows descending on a child to pull
   hair for their nests.

You loved the shabbiness of the world: countries invaded, cities bombed, houses whose
   roofs have fallen in,
       women who have lost their men, orphans, amputees, the war wounded.
What you did not love any longer was a world that had lost its soul.

V

There are more geese than people in this village and the geese know it. They march
   through the streets
       kicking their feet high like the Germans and, later, the Russians.
On parade, necks craned, beaks open, honking like German jeeps and, later, Russian.

I am not sure what the photograph has to do with what happened.

One went to sweep the schools clean in a mountain town. Another took his life but
   where did he take it?
Don’t believe Western news reports: a carnival of resistance. Rather, think of it this way: you
       are an insomniac who has gone to bed on an ordinary August night.

VI