the coast a long ribbon of string,
green earth, woods. Then immigration,
not user-friendly.
Try to find a bar, and when you find one,
a beer. Try to understand the money
you got for your money. Stay warm.
Take a long tour of the monuments:
these are to all the many years the ravens ate,
the long depredations of the wolf, the bear,
the arrival of the Adam Smith Institute.
I write you, love, from Nova Huta,
from Kraków the soured beauty, another night
at the Palace of Culture I’ll get weepily drunk
for you and for the magic of Poland. Na Zdrowie.
They are discussing shoes, footwear, feet,
limping and clucking like chickens
picking over their patch but too old
for the pot now. He wants her maybe
once a year at Christmas. By now
he’ll be home asleep on the couch
or dead drunk on the floor. Her friend,
she had a pair of sandals, perfect,
but they stopped making them, closed
Farms and unfenced fields,
villages, chained cattle,
turkeys, road signs
reading Muzeum Oswiecim:
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Flat grey earth.
Pits, drains, factories.
The machineries of death.
Work will make you free,
Anna Sophia from Hamburg,
Jelena from Kraków,
tenants of the Ghetto Nuovo.
So close, far away as the moon,
as all the lives all the dead lived.
An offshoot of the rail,
tracks ending in grass, chimneys,
a tangle of old wire,
a pond of white human ash.
Time stops here.
And I am not in it. These chipped bowls,
piles of clipped hair, tangle of spectacles
are here for no one.
Beyond this moment nothing ever changes
but the yellow light across the fields,
bleached in the snapshot, fading out, the corner
of the picture turning inward where it burns:
a field of brick chimneys, the horizon
dirty smoke. Nothing beyond this:
a deathless landscape
with the heart burned out, the smile intact.