If we died we might escape the sovereignty of the accidental:

       hours on line to fill a basket of provisions in the open-air cathedral of Prague,

as one who, keeping still, announces herself

the other night where, precisely …

from the village of the first person,

in a time no longer remote.

Before enduring it we will endure it.

XX

This is what we have taken the ordinary world to mean:
bootprints in clay,
the persistence of tracked field.

What was here before imperfectly erased
       and memory a reliquary in a wall of silence.

XXI

Near the stone walls of the bridgeworks we met night after night but no one knew it.
Poppies and cinquefoil, an empty concrete flood pit.
       Grapes ripening in fog.

It is only today that he has disappeared altogether.
The memories are few and like dreams of her life resuming a muted sound of snow
   falling into itself.

In the photograph holding each other with the attention wind gives the fields.
With a field’s sense of shovels.

The bruise, his broken words, and those who wait for him.

It will be winter then, winter, before we see him again.
Not this winter but another.

XXII

A little burnt sorrow, truck-rutted fields—
       that someone attempted to hide this is evidence enough.
In the wounded kitchen, Borovská begins:
Put into question others, put into question God.
Whatever can be taken away is taken
to allow suffering to remain.

Autumn. That autumn. Other autumns.
It was as if we’d been given to walk through a world to come.

XXIII

In a small hotel built not on its own remains but in place of itself:
Stiff bread and blue milk near the hissing fire.
The child asleep in a box by the stove.
A woman’s face in lamplight, a misted woman blurring herself with soap in a stall shower.
A man whose name she doesn’t ask is given a bed and she watches him take sleep and
       through the split curtain studies the street.
Lifting a tiny corner of tissue from the window to the glassy weather of March:
       it is still there, damaged yellow paper.
The train rose along the bank above the tiled roofs, its windows blinded by mud and
   smoke.

XXIV

The same bells ringing then.
Flutes of wind through bullet holes and the sky pitch-smoke.

(She would have hidden her) the woman in whom she hides herself ….

An ash tree in the yard fifty years, soft-barked and bare-leafed as when
       she peeled the blackout paper from the casement
for a glimpse of the hushed gray world of a war without end.

So she stood with her hopes at sail among linens and slept through her childhood in his
   arms
       more actually than if she’d been with him.

XXV

East Berlin is swept clean, its walks sheltered by oaks. There is nothing to buy. People
       stroll and talk, they queue at bookstores.
No one knows where Brecht is buried or where Benjamin lived.