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What One Can
Draw this line again, otherwise
no one will see it.
One can't expect more than
a few signs of having been present.
What do you do in the evening after you've
retired to your unattached house?
A delusion, to draw out silence - because
one cannot begin and one cannot stop.
ODERBRUCH
Camera broken? What a cold spell, and
crows larger than usual, streaking low,
one by one across the far fields, over there.
Nothing over there. Dawn. Gray-yellow dawn
is spreading. A tree in Poland
is the leafless and forlorn tree over there.
A bus rolls over the dam, bright and empty.
Two men on the riverbank, their backs facing
the dam that doesn't begin or end.
You hear nothing. You hear the ice floes
shunting, the circling floes. You hear it
for a long time, later, the drifting ice in the dark.
Broken camera, why else would the pictures
be blurred now? Two men stood on the bank. They
came back. They could tell tales.