The knack of reading history lies

not in the texts, but in the tokens

people leave: the broken pots,

courses of bricks, footprints in mud,

thumbprints in clay, the body parts

in wheel-wells. We learn, very late

in the game of learning, words may

matter less than the matter the wordless

have lost or abandoned. What would

you want to ask of Vesuvian ash, of

the shadows on Asian rooftops,

the wake left by feet fleeing down tarmac,

of the bones beneath the plow?

The shards of memory that will never come

to rest in anyone’s memoir cannot be cleansed

or catalogued because they cannot be grasped

by hand or mind, not heard, imagined or imaged.

They are as pale as punctuation on rain-soaked paper,

as silent as the sailors whose mouths have closed

on a watery cry deep below the waves.

Today perhaps you breathed in the DNA of Nagasaki,

washed off from dust from Dachau with Soweto’s tears,

 picked up echoes from a dark corner of Santiago.

Where else, who else, lives inside your body,

when every place is also someplace else?

These fates only seem mysterious, their reasons

lost in claims of complexity, in the overdetermined

testimony diluting the clues that follow the money.

You know it is foolish to watch and listen because

everything of moment happens out of sight and hearing,

yet you cannot stop yourself from believing in

the urgency of the latest news. In the end, as in

every beginning, there are always explanations from

those who know what they do not want us to know.