Winterreise, storm and snow. U. S. troops in Bosnia tonight
are few, and you, Hans Leo, lipped in your Hessian grave.
Your schizophrenic son in Moabit plays Bach guitar
and tries to maul his mother, sins of the patricians wash
up Havel's creek to a pebbled shore, where I innocently
poison mallard ducks. Pfaueninsel--isle of peacocks,
Hamlet's ghost is Stalingrad. The tank you commandeered
ignit and blew, shrapnelling all ten but you. Now you wander
bodiless the Riesengebirge with tons of vacuum cleaner parts,
pursing Heine's poems and trying to forget you escaped
the U.S. camp. Polish-into-German in the Reich, you've
left me your Nazi-Ami poems of love for Ottowa's birchwoods,
for Arctic malamutes, for every Szczecin dream of reason
as you lap a kilo in the Diemelsee with an angel daughter
on your back, pure god of a girl's small world. You marched
with Schweik as clouds broke, gushed back bile unto earth,
gambling the Swiezinski pride for sad-eyed German fervor.
But you must say, from the coalfield's cemetery tank-array,
where your soul sank fifty meters through the frozen sod,
that forgetting is not forgiving, for thirty years you've hovered
by my bed and cried, wailing the city Stalingrad, revisited.

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