For Lack of a Sign
(To the Unknown Painter, by Anselm Kiefer 1983)

Pigment, shellac and bits of straw.
One makes one’s way by feel,
not landmark. By stumbling over
brush-strokes. This doesn’t look at all
like Buchenwald, Hiroshima, Berlin or even
Dresden, London, Sarajevo
after the bombs.

See, every stroke lines out
to that vanishing point—tomb or bunker,
maybe a retrofitted Weimar of Reason—
in unreachable distance.

I recognize this landscape, after all.
Not from dreams, where we wander
streets lost in their own wholeness;
not from shrapnel sight-bites
on the evening news, which proclaims
everything a war-zone.

Naming is so easy.

"Weather's Revenge" Photograph by Laura Ferguson