ECLOGUE

State Department sponsored austauschülerins gravitating towards the innermost,

            syntactically-warped,

                 clocks of Dresden. Straight-A schülerins, haughty and viral,

                 dummy-like beauties, meant to reproduce

                      war rooms, repeating the words

                 “citoyen du (monde.” Womb)

            with chunks of broken off Berlin Wall wrapped in

       old fashioned, cloth napkins—the trade routes blue-blooded varicose

                      veins, slow and fat. Boom to the haute-

                 route Alp or deep south

       surveillance mechanism—all explosions need time—

to enact some backward, joyous revenge,

       to practice Jan took my countdown pen--(the half life

of neptunium=2.14 million years) “War ist.

            Du bist. Ich,” seen through the parabolic sketch

            on the next page—notes

                 on the electron microscope, ties orchid to

                      its pole with a dollar bill.

            Then Alice, the protagonist climbs the bust of Goethe, overlooking

                 some subatomic skull-fractured wilderness,

                      bombardment kissed (“you have

                 no accent”), then bused back to our separate

                      geographic hinges. I imagine

                      something in the trees ticking like ovens

                 accidentally left on, some genetically modified phrase or

                      drone eyes ablaze, braids down to waist,

                            yodeling like the age

                                    reborn in its history of forgery.