I stood in a fog before the pile of shoes in an exhibition hall,
black bratwurst all that was left of odors out of Buchenwald.
A glass vitrine showed books on moons mesmeric, centipedes,
a bit of quantum physics, no Nils Holgersen (a boy who flew
with swans), all music unharmonic, the tone-deaf tuning fork
of Prussia. A plaque claimed inmates were socialists, fighting
the rout of Munich's beer hall men. No Jews or Leipzig dykes,
no interning of dissidents after the Iron Curtain blew, graves
on the hill where snow still blankets a historiography of crows.
A metal button in the grass. You could hear Mephisto's cough
there, what once bore Goethe to this tree -- the iron fulcrum
of the camp -- in search of temporality, to cease the panic flow
of creativity which reeled one poet so far from where he was.
Verweile doch, du bist so schön, one bird's skeletal remains
the gates we pass through back to blackest ice, warm milk
of the woods of undesire. Great liars of Thuringia huddled
here that one bleak winter before the camp was freed, children
of the barbs painting faces indigo for Fassnacht, and exiting
the world beyond the Dora factory V-8 engine room, through
a door to birchlands, where only a god of nettle-fluff or cesium
could quiet the whey-crapped mouth of another dawn coming on.

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