ABOUT DEAN REED, DROWNED IN THE GDR, 1989*

It took lots to get me to float in this alien pond
and not hear Prussian anymore, nor the rustling in parks,
starlings in them tagged like hospital patients,
and the homing of birds and men to familiar destinations, food,
the reason for this singsong, and the public sounds I made
also not to hear. It takes a moment to pass the controversy.

A block of ice has melted over me
and the tides shift, the sound of boot steps enormous
to my rooted ears, through the styli of my fingernails,
antennae extended post mortem, while the solid melts into air.
Other than an article or two
in those illustrated western tabloids, my name lifts
from March earth like a boot sole, like impressions
of the wrench and compass. And as to grasses,
how can you tell where they'll seed in these mists

that close above the hordes, and these peat-bogs,
democratic, although they save embarrassments too,
a hangman's victim for example, his neck snapped,
or scapegoat in barbarian trousers, curled
in earth like a shell, the snail-like dampness of his manhood
crusted up and substituted --

I couldn't figure out the motor's tricky double-time:
and the basket that hauled my corpse from the pond scum
creaked like a Valkyrie. Stateless,
I heard the crowd's puzzlement, the compass of the engineer
lose the gravity that wedded it to the worker's wrench.
The air must've smelled like manure, coal, sulfur,
a corpse veiled in a meadow.

A grey foam floated over miles of Teutons
where the smoke and ash of Karl Marx-Stadt met Ohio
while I fingerpicked, to Western chords, the Internationale.
I mostly let my wife talk to reporters: my wife
was also my adopted country.

Of that newsweekly, from which my counterpart blazed
technicolor with his dyed sideburns shaved
and buck private's uniform: his rumors in this world,
where they find the scapegoat beside me
with soiled trousers on, now make as much of a racket
as the music above, requiring no ears to listen--

no entertainers in the stars, how the least reverberation strikes us!