for Sterling Morrison
[“As if someonewalked beside you, and
was there, with you”
Guillevic]
Palisades no longer ring Trier.
As it is recorded they once did.
Now the city is a shallow island
reefed by hills and fields,
graceland and wasteland. Imagine
these palisades stretched like a lizard’s white tail,
perimeter of curved stone comforting the solitary nun,
enclosing the outbursts of private war.
As consistent with the memory of written language
as Cracow, Salamanca.
Rain falls lightly in the afternoons.
The mornings are bright, cleared
of phantoms, as though a personal victory
had razed the traumatized basilika.
The tepidaria are filled with roses
and fringed with the appalling cleanliness of raked sand,
the mountain’s faded cheek.
Trier is defined as a Roman city (Augustae
Trevorerum) only because it is disturbing
to say –this is a German city. Which it is.
A thoroughly German city. In two decades
the generation of veterans will be supplanted
by the new amputees, as it has always been,
since the legion first sounded trumps
at the entrance to the still valley.
One extols another’s love under the steep walls.
No one prays or wonders at the absence of prayer.
It is a most peculiar neighborhood where I
have chosen to live out this last year of my life.
Breakfast not the hour for pomp and pedantry.
So guard these thoughts, their fermentation’s reward.
If much left to say ; though none left to hear it.
Those almost mental flowers coloring
the light slopes in the clean air.
With a voice and words at once both gentle and sure
perhaps St. Jerome did not appear so repellent
to the young Latin women
translated inside the walls and gardens of Trier.
If you take the long wall past the medaled names
of the foreign-born donors you will come
to the gates of the town which double as a gallows,
with on special occasions a low trough for the blood
and spume (at Regina’s command, the destruction
of fat Tinoco and skinny Lopez, gruesome step
by gruesome step before the appreciative eyes
of the city’s public): but that was England
and this is wraithlike Germany, where Jerome
walked, partisan of cold showers.
The synagogue is now a cinema ; Marx’s birthplace
bulleted with a noncommittal plaque.
Fleshed with Mosel’s stone
Trier weighs its cataloged inheritance: at the
intersection a triangular island indicates its point in
space, the not-quite-equidistance from Saarbrucken
Koln
Strasbourg
Broadway
El Dorado
Oz
Anacostia
Antofagasta
Austin.
Flushed quail
overshoot the thirty foot of stone,
fleeing above the rose-bordered arena
towards the distant basilika.
Astride a cavity’s new exposure
ancient project hulks,
skeletal black M
a Roman thousand kept afloat
by the thrown leg of the wall:
its height, its still-functioning hunkering
its right to be here.
With the wide river deeping
round anchor’s slow drop,
grief takes her rightful place
among the reveent
and time resumes
in the belly of a phantom basilika.