Downfall (rough draft)(real crap now)

Dowdy pleated cotton batting tacked on walls of this revival theater
brings attention to the faces staring from a tattered photographic blowup
audience visibly impatient with the camera stationed on the proscenium
that sees what I can see, slight restless shift in 1977 inside bucket seats--

the men in flannel and mufti, the women with tents of hair
entangling their shoulders as it might some Neolithic Venus
engaged in the currents of the lazy and altruistic seventies,
the black and white devoid of post-boom chromes and silvers
later splashed conspicuously on Walkmans and imported compacts.

During showtime, Berlin gets hammered, worse than cut-backs,
grey city blown to chunks, the equally grey coats of the Reichswehr afire.

The dusted uniforms in the cinema lack the color of the stones
to which Berlin has been reduced, as their picture is taken,
and as they watch their picture being taken in their present,
a generation passes and we watch them watch the generation previous.
But we will be watching the movie, not them, they're gone.

A failed state shrinks to an interim period wide as a soccer-field.
Our hairier predecessors stare toward a future revival house,

video not having killed theater yet,
nights out not yet confined to the mortgaged living-room,
surplus reels of minutiae abandoned in hot warehouses,

[the extra pockets of their work-shirts stitched with buttons of pearl]
although they’re empty of plastic money and phone cards---
their goatees middle-European like those of emigre professors,
people without the distractions of sinking junk bonds and cable.

How closer they've come to these Downfalls than to us.
As if they were friends who lost touch with us when they moved away, but grew needless of our mutual good wishes or sympathy.
Nested in the blowup, their image muted,
do their semblances gaze beyond their self-embarrassment

at time squandered? How often did they let their majors change,
these lapsed oceanographers or social workers draped in chambray?
Did they fly to suburbs, flee the noise of real-time Downfall?

Time to wave a white flag above rubble. Soon the theater seats
will stop creaking from the bodies that dropped on weakening springs

space enough to miss the space between wars,
to watch one war start one stop, another linger in an interim.
The interim is always with us.