Last sun's got that gold,

need not wrestle.

Lazes with a patience, a way that knows language

is a diagram of sound, and violence

can be gentle.

Of course she didn't come here

but it's her I think of, throwing her head back

on a balcony, to flaunt her laugh in colour

for the camera –

as I pass farms, industrial areas, reservoirs –

a small town

with one church at its centre,

the beaten down straw, the neatly ploughed lines

tunnels black as you'd hope for.

Auden's disowned poem says Find

what occurred at Linz

so I watch for the billowing imago

I watch for the camp he ordered made

where they tested

what the body, what the mind

could stand – and did you know

he planned to return here?

It was to be his mausoleum?

Leafless trees black out the hill

like a man with a dark head of hair

unbalding. A man with a dark head

who came from here, where the bells chime

and the stones still stand

and the horses shake their heads.

Are we sorry they set her up with him?

Would she have preferred to stay nameless, live longer,

or to be one of the ones who blinked

when a bomb hit a building, for her body,

along with the others, to begone?

Instead, for her, the Berlin bunker,

where he held

a massive model of this very city.

Last sun catches lines

made in fields by machines

after the houses have fallen

in shade

until I can see cyanide in bare trees, in tunnels,

I see so many eyelids flipping open, shut.

Last splash of cloud bleeds gold, turns dull

save one last river where the trees haunt the light.