There are flowers growing on the roofs of the cell blocks, the low bricked grass-roofed
   prisons,
       the au revoir of the tunnels.

In starvation rooms along a wall of fading blue figures
       a fresco of hair the blue of bread smoke.

On a wreath’s black ribbon, the word for scaffold: popraviště.

XIV

We cross the Danube into a world in decline:
       nothing has changed here, nothing is as it was.

Darkening lindens, drunks beneath sodium lamps, the bottles belling against the cobbles.

On the back page of a calendar, 1938: “… to the courthouse to be taken away.”
The word on the empty box: Important (all the boxes empty).

In the leather valise, a Dominican habit, altar linens, soap, the clothing of a railway
       conductor wrapped in Rudé Právo
Moth-winged curtains, a blizzard of moths from a trunk’s maw, piano and corpse dust,
       gold attic shafts of spirit.

In the diary “… whoever it was went to prison,”
       a window not opened in twenty-two years.

XV

The past is not where you left it, Svetko.
It is a ruined city, spackled with grief,
       The house, still yellow stucco with pear trees.
Empty swallow nests hang in the eaves
       woven with bits of collar and sleeve.
There is a diary open to the words cannot remain here.

XVI

What has eaten these walls? wind in the mustard fields.
Death maps.
Rat teeth.

Hurrying we find German war maps of the High Tatras where Anna lived, and one of
   Brno
       as if there were a corpse in the armoire.

XVII

A mirror of swans, a gesture of regret, bridge stones rippling in the Vltava,
       your face strewn with childhood:

We were looking for_____ we found_____.

The hourly figures struck each other.
They knew the time was passing in which we are now suspended.

As long as it takes snow to slip from the coal piles,
       a memory barely retrieved from a fire is (the past) in its hiding place.

XVIII

We find her in a block of worker housing flats on a small namástí bordering a ditch
       near one of the places where
Hitler could have been stopped.

Her name appears in a column of names: Borovská.

My voice fills the call box:
“This is the granddaughter of Anna Bassarová and the daughter of Michal.”

There was so much weeping, she said, but never anyone.
A language even paper would refuse,
bell music rolling down the cold roofs,
their footsteps disappearing as they walked.

She stood on the landing of disbelief in Brno as if the war were translucent behind us,
       the little ones in graves the size of pillows.

XIX

This is a map drawn from memory of the specular itinerary of exile.

An erasure of everything destroyed yet left intact:

Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.

Kafka drawn in soft coal.