Travel Papers

By boat to Seurasaari where

the small fish were called vendace.  

A man blew a horn of birchwood

toward the nightless sea.

Still voice. Fire that is no fire.

Ahead years unknown to be lived—

Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then

one by one, hours. Outside

(so fleetingly) ourselves—

In a still mirror, in a blue within

where this earthly journey dreaming

itself begins,

thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible.

Mountains before and behind,

heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse,

then a sea village of chartreuse fronds.

Spent fuel, burnt

wind, mute swans.

We drove the birch-lined

highway from Dresden

to Berlin behind armored

cars in late afternoon,

nineteenth of June, passing

the black cloud of a freight

truck from Budapest.

Through disappearing

villages, past horses grazing vanished fields.

The year before you died, America

went to war again on the other

side of the world.

This is how the earth becomes,

you said, a grotto of skeletons.

In the ruins of a station: a soaked

bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove.

White weather, chalk and basalt,

puffins, fuchsia and history shot

through with particles

of recognition: this one

wetted down with petrol then

set alight, that one taking

forty rounds, this other

found eleven years later in a bog.

In the station house, imaginary

maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry

of arrivals, the logs of ghost

ships and a few prison

diaries written on tissue paper.

Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies?   

The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze?  

Through the casements of glass hand-blown

before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop

through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs

in wind through glass.

Who were we then? Such

a laughter as morning peeled

its light from us!   

You said the cemeteries were full in a voice

like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom

but silent without grasshoppers or bees.  

What do you want then? You with your

neverness, your unknown,

your book of things, you

with once years ahead to be lived.

Your father believes he took you

with him, that you are

in an urn beside your sleeping mother

but I am still writing with your hand,

as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.

Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight.  

Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not—

do not, upon waking, gaze out a window

if you wish to remember your dream

An ache of hope that you will come back—

the cawing flock is not your coming.

Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind

in the mustard fields?—or walk instead

beside me through the asylum in Krakow?   

Hours after your death you seemed

everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight.  

Now your moments are clouds

in a photograph of swifts.

In the hour held

open between day and night under

the meteor showers of Perseid

we held each other for the last time.

Dead, you whispered where is the road?  

There, through the last of the sentences, just there—

through the last of the sentences, the road—