A Crystalled Night

I collect my body as I walk along the Danube…
The trail that led me to the tripping stone where no one has ever
Tripped, flat it lays and every morning a cigarette put out on its vague shine.
One dog pees and the rest follow– all we creatures subject to the banality
Of evil. We pass the pillars of the large synagogue that once stood, below
Our ancestral hut– shaded with the palm frauds of tragedy My People
Suffered. Four boys play pickup soccer– dangling tzitzis and grabbing
Hold of their yarmulkes when they take a shot.
They look at me and see just that, the plain prospect of wicked–
they are, of course, from Leopoldstaat–
Of erasure and other.

It starts to snow as I light a cigarette on the sidewalk.
Snowfall in Europe could always be our ashes.
The Danube is, afterall, the biggest Jewish graveyard, uninterrupted.
The melting alps in the spring flowed forward towards the disintegrated bodies.
By a Swiss stream sits a cabin, where survivors taking refuge and Nazis fleeing
Lodged alike. Nothing so vitally, brutally awkward as tortured and
Torturer making breakfast-buffet eye contact. Or so I imagine, falling asleep.

Sipping pumpkin soup the next day, Oma tells me about the Oak
In Eichman’s front yard, illustrated by the one meeting our gaze.
His confessions are buried there, his tapes of admittance at the base of
Autumn abundance. I press rotten walnuts into the damp ruts. The sober,
sun-laying ones I collect after breaking nature’s case between heel and stone,
Some hard body broken, once again thinking of all the bones.
And the flesh that was once there, I guess. Pruning grapes in a rusted vineyard,
in the masonry town of the patron saint of joint pain. Some dead stay embodied.
The rind-populated fields, the shallow lake. Oma says
Secrets are sewn into these rows of mounds. Makes sure I never forget.
She puts plaques in the unmarked forests.
I returned at night to the hostel and a blind bumbling drunk glass broke,
And the city spoke of itself: Banal evil.