Views towards Mauern (2007 | 2023)

View towards Mauern (May 2007)

Ripply stream that runs the vale taking

its sweet time is maker, and all else

seems bed-mud, placed there

pebbles, slight wake.

The hull manor shelled in wartime

across the road from farm and chapel

hides tulips bedded dense

under its four remnant walls

with render tattered and moss-tinged

canvas crumbling from ragstone

masonry, unrecognizable.

Old orchard pent with juniper

amid the meters of dying apple trees,

limbs buttressed with metal joints :

slant-plumed deviations

from once-mapped growth,

all that bloomed now greying

over disintegrating

barbed wire.

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View towards Mauern (September 2023)

The Autobahn howling

behind the first swell

of forest. Crying

of whatever researchable

kind of bird. The old

orchard is thinner

now, other younger

trees grown more

full in a proliferation

of fences. Posts meant

for sighting where

the field stream crosses

under the trail

bright and widened

with new gravel, integrated

into a regional

network of bike routes.

A marker relates

the chronicle of the way:

a Roman thoroughfare

became a road for pilgrims

northward, whose needs

the chapel was raised

to service, making for Speyer

as Christians who could

warred in Palestine.

For the first time, the portal

to the chapel is open

revealing a hayloft

over concrete ground

with barrels, tractor wheels,

harrows long parked

in the dark interior.

A neomodernist house

built in the 2010s

suspended on stilts

5 meters high

within the footprint

of the ruined manor’s

four braced walls containing

no garden, just untended

grass in the shade

of the structure above.

911 Turbo S in burnt gold

behind the hedgerow

flashing as I drive

past. It hurts to look

at the sky. Floaters, scars

cut the retina. Weird flashes

out on the blue that are

neurons firing in corpuscular

conversion of stimulus

into sight. At some point

I sunk into the cold

bed mud of understanding

what I stood on. This is what

I understand: leaves

stepped on, disturbed

do not become

fossils. The very act

of imagining a course

in life will keep it

from taking shape,

coming true.