Zoo Station

“It turns out you are the story of your childhood

and you’re under constant revision . . .”

–William Matthews

Call it the Berlin of childhood,

the occupation marks, the cheese

and real coffee you give away

until the pile of ash beneath

a streetlight’s vague umbrella

of light reconstitutes as bones

and a handshake, a trench coat

and dusty fedora, a cough instead

of small talk. And admit it:

he owns you, remembers you:

your lies and the dice

you shook as you walked the alleys

off Zoo Station talking

to anyone, selling counterfeit tickets

to next week’s opera, as if ghosts and exiles

had left behind their voices, their music.

He remembers what you traded:

a little whiskey for a letter

from someone’s father, cigarettes

for a handkerchief stained

with lipstick. And then nothing, nothing

left to sell. So you listed your friends

one through eleven and drew maps

to their apartments, sewed numbers

on their sleeves as they slept, made calls

from pay phones near men’s rooms,

by fountains filled with rubble,

then watched until you were all

alone amid the ruins

snapping pictures, a Baby Brownie

stolen from the wreck of a soldier’s

Willy, his wink as he died permission

enough, though it was raining

as always, as today in dreams

and sepia snapshots, in novels so dire

and sad the library pages are stained

with tears and fingerprints, even here,

even now, it is raining. The past:

we contracted our sins in the vestibules

of bombed-out monuments,

did the “Lord’s work” in the light,

which increasingly stayed to itself

beyond city limits, motes dusty

and yellow in barns and farmhouses.

“Fallow are the fields filled with mines,”

said the drunk vicar in his rectory

next to the empty lot, the timbers

and charred stones, the chips

of stained glass holding a sallow memory

of sunlight. “I speak for God,” he said.

“What have you done to earn my love?”

And there again the wink as the rain fell

like bits of lead exploding the mines.

And now the other confessor, also recently

of ashes, the once-a-week session:

“You were saying?” he says, fidgets,

looks past you at the clock, an hour

nearly gone. And all the light

in the parking lot bounces hard off

the blinds, the books aglow in stacks,

Passages, Finding Our Fathers,

Iron John (Oh God). “Let’s start

at the beginning,” he says. Yes: Berlin,

the years after the war, the years

sold off or abandoned and somehow

still there, all there for trade:

a blue black market at the end

of every street, years to buy back

when the time is right. As if it will ever be.