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.