Travel Papers

Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur . —René Char By boat to Seurasaari where the small fish were called vendace. A man blew a horn of birchwood toward the nightless sea. Still voice. Fire that is no fire. Ahead years unknown to be lived— Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then one by one, hours. Outside (so fleetingly) ourselves— In a still mirror, in a blue within where this earthly journey dreaming itself begins, thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible. Mountains before and behind, heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse, then a sea village of chartreuse fronds. Spent fuel, burnt wind, mute swans. We drove the birch-lined highway from Dresden to Berlin behind armored cars in late afternoon, nineteenth of June, passing the black cloud of a freight truck from Budapest. Through disappearing villages, past horses grazing vanished fields. The year before you died, America went to war again on the other side of the world. This is how the earth becomes, you said, a grotto of skeletons. In the ruins of a station: a soaked bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove. White weather, chalk and basalt, puffins, fuchsia and history shot through with particles of recognition: this one wetted down with petrol then set alight, that one taking forty rounds, this other found eleven years later in a bog. In the station house, imaginary maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry of arrivals, the logs of ghost ships and a few prison diaries written on tissue paper. Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies? The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze? Through the casements of glass hand-blown before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs in wind through glass. Who were we then? Such a laughter as morning peeled its light from us! You said the cemeteries were full in a voice like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom but silent without grasshoppers or bees. What do you want then? You with your neverness, your unknown, your book of things, you with once years ahead to be lived. Your father believes he took you with him, that you are in an urn beside your sleeping mother but I am still writing with your hand, as you stand in your still-there of lighted words. Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight. Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not— do not, upon waking, gaze out a window if you wish to remember your dream An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming. Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind in the mustard fields?—or walk instead beside me through the asylum in Krakow? Hours after your death you seemed everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight. Now your moments are clouds in a photograph of swifts. In the hour held open between day and night under the meteor showers of Perseid we held each other for the last time. Dead, you whispered where is the road? There, through the last of the sentences, just there— through the last of the sentences, the road—