ekphrasesStreets of Weimar

I wandered around the streets of the city... ate a leg of deer with some weird Thuringen apertif at Zum Elefantenkeller. We'd just been to Buchenwald--up the hill, in plain view of rthe streets of Weimar, along the Teufelskrippe. Goethe and Schiller's gravestones, like long-lost lovers, music emanating still from Nietsche's black klavier... but we had changed.... forever.

Buchenwald Landscape

Eeerie silence of the woods. One lone yellow birch,

whose seed fell after the mass graves were turned,

grows as lank and tall as the forest of firs

that shadows it. At the gates, the temperature

drops ten degrees; when the mist parts at noon,

you can be sure you see settlements down below

in the towns of Ettersberg and Ramsla.

Surely then if anyone had peered at the sky

they would have known! If some old queen

or Bulgar Jew cries out and nobody hears...

how well do you know there was no sound?

Kilns pour black lather into Nephele's clouds--

droplets of something with a human smell

soak my overcoat and send me shivering home.

published in Global City Review, Fall 1994, Nr 4