Revisions

As a boy in Dachau, the memorials of dead
gone for generations were everywhere.
German chocolate dripped off my lips and stained
the walkway like the blood of the dead
once stained the rows of henbane and belladonna
in the fields around us.
But my eyes always drew back to the wall--
the polished marble wall showing the names of bloodlines.
Stein the carpenter. Goldberg the farmer. Eckerman the girl next door.
Kaplan, the young boy who loved to read.
My reflection covered them all. For moments, they lived through me.
The pictures above those names? They envied me.
And so i wiped away the dust darkening their faces,
the pollen of our dying.
That's what we are after all, doppelgangers of ourselves at every turn,
revisions of each other, word economy of the gods...
Older, we sense this. Nobody to tuck us in, no stools to reach
that colder light in the pantry of us all.
And that wall at the camp? It was razed.
LIkewise, the porcelain seraphims lining the entrance,
and the ashes of mourning littering the hills of flowers
whose roots stamp out the faces of the dead.
We are memory over and over.