Alenka: You must not speak anymore. I am going to tell you.

VII

His grave is strewn with slipper flowers in a coppice of loss.
       The girl whose uncle was a violin, Borovská.
Years taken from them: birch light, his breath in her mouth, what do we have to forget?
       In 1941 he knew her, all shawl, her fear.
A basket of bread and klobása wrapped in pain.
       That he had escaped the fate of the others was unknown to her.

VIII

This is close, and passing time brings it no closer: the years, cities moving beside a train.
       What comes back? That Matejka could fold his ears up and stick them inside his head.
       That the women of his village pissed standing up.
       All winter, sandwiches of duck fat.

Then someone calling. It might be from the past. It has that quality.

IX

Folded swans in the mirror, Vltava,
your hand on the bridge rail
in a blackened city under a soot heaven
holding a banner completely fashioned of hope.

X

Beyond the tarred Teplice road, past cut fields, tarpaulin-covered hayricks,
       petrochemical plants spewing black smoke,
Poppies afflicted the hayfields with wounding brilliance.

The people were harvesting cauliflower then from the gardens of Terezin.
Blank-eyed, a boy pedaled a bicycle back and forth with a naked broken doll in its basket.

At the prison gate a woman stood holding a bouquet of leeks wrapped in paper.
Two Czech soldiers strolled through what had once been the women’s compound.
Doors opened and closed, swallows dipped into the prison yard and rose.
We walked the cold, swept-clean barracks, ran our hands down long trestle tables and
   tiered bunks.
We picked forget-me-nots and left them where he died.
Somewhere here, somewhere with his name carved into a wall, are the words
       into your sun-blessed life.

XI

In the café across from Zivnostenská banka we are able to buy
       a sack of bread for the road, and poppies.
In the tin light we walk, our sandwiches in foil
       like the light along Národní, street of the kiosks.

The wind has eaten the faces from the angels of Charles Bridge
       as if the earth were finished with us.

We leave our konvalinka for the saint, white tulips for the mother of God.

XII

Along Leninova, soot pines and state trucks,
       a world emptying of human belief.

Since the war, they begin, or after the invasion:
a little stiff bread to soak up the blood
(meat and boiled potatoes),
a small silence for each of them,
salt in the palm,
a cold stone of bitterness.

“It is playing chess with us.”

XIII

A two-hour queue for pears, a waxen hill of spent tapers where
       Jan Palach immolated himself.
Meat lines, bridge lights in the Vltava.

In a child’s leather prayer book from Terezin: V.K. 1940, hearts, a police doll wearing
   the star.

This is Hana Minka’s field of flowers.
This is Gobi Friová’s imaginary house.