When they were old, he was old, and when they came for the old, he went.
the August Assumption the feasted festive arrival with the Peterite dogs the preterite lights up from the heartvoid the hearthvoid and the famine drought and disease the dizzying vertigo’s luck the guttersuck the Selektion Doris one way the other from Łódź then Lodsch loading unŁódźing years ago one hundred eight I am Harlemwide Mourningside bedbound chained to the pillow-cuffs the boxcar bedcar trackbed trundlepassover Poland the protectorate rectorate the rectum of the world the anus mundi the hot heinous hundmund I’m freezing alone here exposed by ignorance inattention the names are the first things you notice besides the noise the glareblare the clash the orchestral swillswirl the clarinet twirl and the trumpet presenting its bell to the same sun over Cologne Köln-Deutz Łódź our evacuation they called it Verlagerung after rung an angel’s ladder the traintracks to Auschwitz from which as they say in America’s America no one returned with their eyes or their lives from the unpent doors of Poland’s partition halfnaked in half an overcoat and shivering warm we were overflowed into the Appell with the chimneys of Birkenau high in the distance burbling brown schnapps and black tea for two lines the Sonder triangulating the yellow and pinkred the milites Christi their dogs with their guntongues barking gums at the sunset stilled in the spotlight the klieg and the clarinet waft and the cello’s low chords sforzando the music of painting a Boschmess the Boschbabel of rabbis rebbeim aged with their beards shorn curling the curves of the old Via Egnatia routed on another train yet another same freight rollingstock from Auschwitz and before Auschwitz in from Łódź going west to go east going east to go west by south sacking weddings brises barmitzvahs shivas along the route the rootway the day storming nights the leaps from the tower burning the Crusader pillage the Calvary charge the poisoned wells quelle the bells of who knows which canonical hour the coming of compline in claps beaten to sacks for the heads of hanged children impaled upon the Holy Lance of Peter Bartholomew the death of the Charlemagnetrain at the Antioch stop the third city of the world the penultimate station of our borne cross bent to wriggle worm the snakecharming trance harm at Xanten and Meer north of Neuss and the saving grace of Abbot Bernard the succor of Joel ben Isaac haLevi the Rabbi of Mainz the anonymous Kalonymos Would that my head toll the trainrang the hydraulick and huffapuff the triangle clang and the cymbals the tongue’s crowded clutter Mutter pushed to one side pulled with my father out to the other split sundered the distance between cleaves Wevelinghoven and Geldern the Cleves border between Kerpen and Kempen the Ninth of Av it wasn’t but there was blood enough in the Rhinerein amidst the Rhinefine Zeitime air the silver river flow of Constantine’s sword Damocles’ be damned by the goring of pregnant women the coring of babies never had any myself because Eva by Agnesz I couldn’t have been married for only a month of a morning with rings only locks of new hair hers or mine packedtight pricked to shiver in that heat already halfway to death in that roil my glasses shattered losing them saved my life could see clear to the gates of iron and gold wasn’t blind to the retrogression the regressionre Doris stroking my hair and the hair of my face before it was shaved I was blond an echt Aryan though grayed white bald the train-plain the floodlain the rippedopen windowless slatlife the boardview and the cupped seek bowed to the wood the rot the piled high of Gypsies dead in the corner we killed who killed us and Edelmann Adelmann Tadel the chugalughorseshodslug the canvas crate the palm balm of bathing in piss green mound of corpses rotting quickfast in the heat the bodies of pregnant feti fallen to deaths from castle walls tossed hurled tower vomit at dawn dashed the conquering of the land promised to the Holy Romans beyond the moatmouth the turrets’ teethwire barbed we told jokesongs jokestories sextalk fucktalk and fucked and sexed and recited the alphabet in every language we knew quietly silent my sister dead a month my brother dead a month he was sick and had a cough a pestilent mark my Muttering mother had another fortyeight hours but that’s life I’ve been told at the postoffice grocerystore no tougher than Doris never not by my side in that carspiralswirl the boxwhorl our own world in the corner to squat or die heatstricken from record reciting to each other libretti and the birthdates of painters the Bull the ode and the code the directions to the ring’s diamond my Muttery mother’s stone we whispered and buried like a close cousin in the cemetery in the Mittelalterlicher Friedhof we unburied reburied unreburied under a rock in a park named renamed then sold by Agnesz and I to the American in the green hat for the price of leaving Amsterdam London New York New York amid the sun of a deathdawn Rhineland Reinrind the skinpeel wealrope and the tug of the Muslims on the road to Byzantium after Tiberias fell and Count Emicho of Leiningen came up the Main toward Mexico the country bordering Hungary had counted his dead at Speyer and Worms and Mainz and Cologne summating in Dachau the apotheosis Treblinka or what passed for a pogrom at Kielce our commute the chugmute dare fareless wayed south through Poland the huts and fences and houses the horses and cows and the cowlike horselike lumpenprolesouls the Bauern that bowed to live scarce along the road to Nicæa from Lower Lorraine Volkmar taking the Bohemian road to Hungary the capital of Mexico Gottschalk up the Rhine through Bavarian peasants to me being a Kölnik a Kölsch I should have gone to Israel Palestine promised an Eretz it was the true gem of Westphalia to die like a human in the Crusades with the blood baked into matzah at the gates on the roofs even the libeled gables Coral of Florida Boca Raton would’ve been nice down there near Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth you’d get dysentery from if you can still get the runs in this country this rushhour spewed bloodred bloodbed pisstain shitsheets I can’t contain myself get a Pole over here now that the visas are legion have them clean broom and mop diaper my room for slave wages they loaded us living they unloaded us dead handandlegging our corpses out the halfdead the neardead the cleardead bodies piled by the Jaffa Gate the Dung and that of the Messiah Moshiach Moshiach Moshiach the cemetery to be resurrected becoming defiled desecrated in advance of my father’s arrival one cattlecar cowcar behind roiling box of hot shit and piss and sementov mazeltov shake the hands you have left you’ve survived the ghetto the foursquare boxbare oxspare slaughterhouse shechtloused Holy Shit Sepulchre it’d been an enormous dark blackstone mouthrone with surprises my tongue sucked into every slumped cheek corner drawer piled deep into wardrobed Biedermeier tin toy soldiers their rations the rusty lime rinds lemon orange and pineapple the palms of Antioch at the Gate of the Dog after the sojourn in Armenia under whose fronds Christians first became Christians became goyim expert at the shield and the sword the stab in the backside of tapestries bunched ripped and torn to smile their mess at the wall the Mona Lisa reversed the retrograde sheetmusic piano reduction of Dvořák’s American symphony From the New World its horse-hump traindump rhythms tracking past the Hungarian frontier on into Mexico the domain of King Coloman and the Danube defeat of the threefold incursion after the forcible baptism of the Ratisbon massacre consecrating corpses for Clermont ten days in November Pope Urban II hanged Odo in piñata effigy packed him with nails to swing as a warning from an overpass trestle the Hohenzollernbrücke exploded over the Bosporus to the Dom’s Magi Gottschalk Volkmar the trainyard workhard and whoever’s the taxistani shvartze Robert d’Arbrissel or Picardy Peterthehermit that fisheating loafer and fishy winedrinker with the face of the talking donkey rode arebackedandfoot Hugh and Henry and what’shisname Walter and the trinity of sons of the Count of Zimmern following the goldstar through flood and pestilence drought famine and a meteorshower in from Deutz Land of the Barbarians the beerhall pigs the sows of the Sau at the Chorgestühl of the wine cellar the Weinbar whose owner’s lover knew my cousin Felix or Franz a friend of Rumkowski’s Bumbowski’s Slumhauski’s if anyone was who didn’t survive but wouldn’t charge it to his tab at that café you say coffeeshop Angela’s Diner back on the Humboldtstraße the monk’s reflection in the face of the faience the Turkish waitress I didn’t want to bring home on the tram I’d always lived with my parents until Auschwitz my Stammtisch Begrüssung for your supper the Shalom whispered into my ear by a Kapo at the entrance to Block 26 for the cutting of hair the bathing of skin flayed the brand the tattoo tracks scarred over the quarantine that is the horizon Hannoversche with the SA just going Deus vult that highvoltage Dios mio conquista crazed with their pikes and stakes burning whipped taskmasterace triangles redlettered with country the crosses lashed on their surcoats and swords their lancetrance maces the haste with which