Rhein II - The Photograph
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Set between two slabs of green
the slender Rhein is seen.
If she goes from left to right
is no one's surest known.
The sky is overcast above
and no birds there are seen.
I am an admirer, sure,
of green and then the green.
12/29/2018
we drove late afternoon
over the dark Rhein,
the sky fake with orange,
to Bonn : to a house with cool, emplty rooms,
white with words, dark with chords,
to an elegant Hammerflügel ;
for my father the end of a journey,
but the start of the sublime
( for A.F. Philibert)
The Moon has fallen next to the Rhein
A block kneeling to water ;
black as the night`s eye
hard as a monk`s hand
scared as a buried knife
a trick with four views
This bird gasps and chokes feathers,
sick with stones
lost as a thousand years
This holy mud is lost in a dirty evening
As the trains pull across your face.
After all the years, what’s left
are names. Fasnet in Emmendingen,
weekend Bummeln with an upturned
thumb. Breisach imperially sealed
to the Habsburgs, still guarding
a foggy Rhein To Bagersee, how many
stops along the Strassenbahn. Ganterbier
and Kaiserstuhl, Totenkopf’s volcanic
crown. He snapped my picture
in a stubblefield of Drachenzähne
from the last world war. Schwarzwald
Sundays, the path to Wendelin,
patron of shepherds, a saint enshrined
in birdsong.. Bodensee. That trek
up Schauinsland to look for
Switzerland. Donaueschingen
promising 1700 miles of Danube,
a waltz to the Black Sea we never
sailed. Thousands of years of names.
Every name to call but his.
Streaking skyward the tracers rip
Into hanging soldiers
Falling about into mayhem
Pulsing through blood-filled ears
Hearing comrades scream
Understanding nothing
This is the war I found…
Hatred filled hardened hunter
Into smashed building
Homes pulverized rubble
Strewn about the decaying mass
The scorched metal burning
Bodies of the fallen men
The miasma of war I forever inhale…
Tigers rolling through billowed flame
Firing upon burnt battlefield blindly
Retreating in terror I leave the voices
Calling as I my boots tamp by arms
Reaching for safety I couldn’t render
Brothers abandoned in the Arnhem snow
These are the ghosts of war who haunt me….
Battle’s percussion on the horizon distant
I fade through the fields upon the Rhein
Farmhouses glow a midnight path
Walking to the beat of gun fire echoes
Off the walls of a shelter a little boy sits
Unafraid of the man feeding him chocolate
In the crater of a bomb…
This flash of hope my salvation from war.