Souffrance

I think of you in that sea of graves beyond the city,
where many stones have been left, among them,

mine: a little piece of dolomite to weigh down a slip of paper.
I would have put your gloves and umbrella in the coffin,

along with one more morning in Berlin with Tanya, an hour
of pigeons rising around you, lilacs wrapped in news

stories, a minute at the barricades, another riding
on your father’s shoulders through the garlic fields, even cigarettes

left over from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook, a pen full of ink, and that short

poem by Hölderlin you loved, so you could go up in smoke
together: you, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Hölderlin.

In the aftermath, you are emulsion on paper, a corpse listening beneath
the ground to a train passing through a polaroid of clouds.

It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.

Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice.