There was a time you were burned for being

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Catholic, then king turned queen & you burned for being Protestant. There were bears chained to
poles in the street, & dogs--which were wolves then--tearing at them to see who’d win, & a
gathering for the gallows & rats making fast love in the soot-colored houses.

Back then, there was this German lord out in the far Black Forest Heidegger would later call
home, & he wanted a castle on this impossible hill, & his people kept falling or getting crushed
by large stones & dying horrible deaths & it was so drop-dead

gorgeous when it was done & then the lord died & the leaves turned orange & red & green again
a few hundred times over the bones of the broken builders who never had names & then the
castle was rediscovered, & a famous modern photographer got an aerial shot while dangling

from a helicopter & it became a print & my grandfather who sings barbershop in the church
choir & who late in life rakes the leaves & builds little rock walls to pen his chickens,

he bought this print & put it in his rocking-chair room near his grandfather clock & there it hangs
before him as he slowly forgets his name, as he stumbles to the stone well he found obscured by
leaves in his forest plot & looks down into the hollow cathedral, calling out all the forgotten
names for god.