Archaic Figure

Headless in East Berlin, no goddess

but a named mere girl (Ornithe, "Little Bird'')

out of the rubble, six centuries underneath

	the plinth of what we quaintly call

Our Time, informs the foaming underside

of linden boulevards in bloom, sweet hide

laid open onto—sterile as an operating table,

	past the closed incision of the Wall—

the treeless reach of Alexanderplatz,

paved counterpart of the interior flatland,

halfway across the globe, we'd left behind:

	projection, factor, yield, the quantifiable

latitude; malls, runways, blacktop; tressed

cornsilk and alfalfa, drawn milk of the humdrum

nurture there were those of us who ran away from

	toward another, earlier, bonier

one, another middle of the earth, yearned-for stepmotherland of

Hölderlin and Goethe:

sunlight and grief, the cypress and the

	crucifix, the vivid poverty

of terraced slopes, of bread, wine, olives,

fig and pomegranate shade we stumbled into,

strolling the sad northern drizzle, in

	the uprooted Turks' quasi-bazaar,

as here, among uprooted artifacts, we've come

upon this shape's just-lifted pleats, her

chitoned stillness the cold chrism of a time

	that saw—or so to us it seems—

with unexpected clarity to the black core

of what we are, of everything we were to be,

have since become. Who stands there headless.

	Barbar, she would have called us all.