Somewhere in a square in the old world, by the Hotel Princip,
by the Palace of Justice, somewhere in a park
of clean gravel and poodle-cut trees
beside cobblestones seamed with tramlines, somewhere near
a kiosk café whose waiter, in stubble and butcher-
striped apron will fail to appear,
sometimes for days, at three wrought iron tables, bearing
coffees concentrated to a fierce point, a black
hole – one sip will suck you in,
turned to sparkling stone… Somewhere like this they sit, two
old men, each one older than the other.
Bending forward, they sit at a pace
from which the three-lane traffic is a shimmery smear,
a mirage, oil on water, and the pieces
themselves seem a fidget,
a jitter of cause and effect which leaves no choice but,
now and then, to lift a hand… a moment’s
late appraisal, as the world
turns one more orbit. One
moves. Looks up. The other
nods. I’ve seen them at the black and white
marble table with the raised squares
in the Garden for the Blind, a table like a plinth
on which they are building ice sculptures
of certain uncertainties, and
it is beautiful, very, they might say. If ever they spoke.
(Kibbitzers do the chatter for them.) They
live, if indeed they do,
in twenty worlds at once, all intercutting: if, and if
not, then, and if then, not… Every
thirty years or so, a bang:
slammed door or backfire of exhaust, and now and then
a handgun. All the combinations shatter
into flight, up
over rooftops, dewlapped gables, weather vanes
to reform, circle, circle, homing
on wherever we may be.