it loved to happen

The Unseen

In Krakow it rained, the stone arcades and cobbles
And the smoky air all soaked one penetrating color
While in an Art Nouveau café, on harp-shaped chairs,

We sat making up our minds to tour the death camp.
As we drove there the next morning past farms
And steaming wooden villages, the rain had stopped

Though the sky was still gray. A young guide explained
Everything we saw in her tender, hectoring English:
The low brick barracks; the heaped-up meticulous

Mountains of shoes, toothbrushes, hair; one cell
Where the Pope had prayed and placed flowers; logbooks,
Photographs, latrines—the whole unswallowable

Menu of immensities. It began drizzling again,
And the way we paused to open or close the umbrellas,
Hers and ours, as we went from one building to the next,

Had a formal, dwindled feeling. We felt bored
And at the same time like screaming Biblical phrases:
I am poured out like water; Thine is the day and

Thine also the night; I cannot look to see
My own right hand … I remembered a sleep-time game,
A willed dream I had never thought of by day before:

I am there; and granted the single power of invisibility,
Roaming the camp at will. At first I savor my mastery
Slowly by creating small phantom diversions,

Then kill kill kill kill, a detailed and strangely
Passionless inward movie: I push the man holding
The crystals down from the gas chamber roof, bludgeon

The pet collie of the Commandant’s children
And in the end flush everything with a vague flood
Of fire and blood as I drift on toward sleep

In a blurred finale, like our tour’s—eddying
In a downpour past the preserved gallows where
The Allies hung the Commandant, in 1947.

I don’t feel changed, or even informed—in that,
It’s like any other historical monument; although
It is true that I don’t ever at night any more

Prowl rows of red buildings unseen, doing
Justice like an angry god to escape insomnia. And so,
O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes

Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most
Capable of all your former creatures—we have
No shape, we are poured out like water, but still

We try to take in what won’t be turned from in despair:
As if, just as we turned toward the fumbled drama
Of the religious art shop window to accuse you

Yet again, you were to slit open your red heart
To show us at last the secret of your day and also,
Because it also is yours, of your night.

—Robert Pinsky