About this Poem

^{At the beginning . . . which is to awaken you to the right kind of Joy in serious times, we must list all those who have been killed since I last wrote. . . . 
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1942, Germany}

It has to account for its untied shoelaces as well as its Extermination
Camps. Sitting among all those languages in the Munich beer garden.
Hitler’s first speech a few blocks away. A masked ball where
the costumes are all switched around. Those carnival grab bags
filled with joy or remorse. Above me the clouds are paralyzed.
I have to wipe the dust from my soul. The wind holds its breath.
Bosnia, 1994: one group of men forced to bite off the testicles
of another group. Others to stand in the snow till their feet rot.
These things orbit now like a planet too far to see. Even the bee
can’t figure a way out of my stein. Light staggers through the trees.

Every moment is filled with other moments. According to Bell’s
Theorem whatever happens to this bee influences a history yet
to be written. Like the seed stars that smudge the trail of Mira as
it slips across the sky. All my maps are smudged with atrocities.
There are so many voices that are our own voices. Rhythm is just this
oscilloscope of the soul. We come from a place that has always
been inside us. Our words migrate helplessly. The world reflects
only itself. Which is why we have to create our own memories.

The paths from here spread out like cracks in ice. The man
across the table’s from Krakow. He doesn’t want to talk about
the occupation and its lives turned to smoke. Only the mechanical
Trumpeter in his church spire. The song stops where his real
ancestor was felled by an enemy’s arrow. In the silence that follows
don’t we all have to begin again? At the end of a line, the door
left open for a moment where you can fall in love, remember
what you wanted to forget, forget what you wanted to remember.

Why do we think our metaphors will save us? The world is only
itself. Time is just our way of imagining it. At least the bee has
ultraviolet vision to see everything we can’t. We have to light
our dark spaces with the sputtering matches of our words.
We have to follow wherever they lead us. There’s this little
hole in existence we all pass through. Someone is always entering.
He’s the one who invents me while I think I am writing about him.