all of its bones have been arranged
as they were at the excavation site:
numbered--& gathered in straight lines
describing a ritual geometry of death
nothing real is left to comprehend--
whatever past remains exists only
as a monument to forgetting, its relic,
a secret history of ruins ...
even as you weave the altstadt’s medieval
streets--the fateful bombed-out
cathedrals their stumps of masonry--
a fable of extinction is unravelling:
a prehistory of night, before the first angels
fell burning from the sky--like meteorites