Hummel has lost his memory.
He describes a city
in the discolour of concrete and snow,
beneath a marble sky crosscut with wires
and the trajectories of ravens.
Obscure notions of Hungary
cross his mind as if
he may have lost it there.
There was a tragedy
in an unfinished Gothic lot
dominated by a mountain
the village feared.
The trains were too dangerous to travel.
He sought deliverance in a church
furious with darkness and vengeance,
he can hear its disembodied choir
screaming for release.
In this world no one goes unpunished.
Haunted by the distant knocking
of a trapped man he cannot reach,
Hummel is condemned.
He cannot presume his innocence
any more than he can admit his guilt,
the arrival of the prosecution is imminent.
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In a small two up-two down town
of perpetual rains and dark afternoons
a woman, a clairvoyant, waits by the phone
in a brown study without books.
She works the law of averages on the nightshift
in a home for discarded husbands,
who lost their place in the chain of command
for consorting with the angel of steeplejacks.
This is what she does:
when the phone rings she takes its photograph
and keeps one print in a file
entitled the denial of longing,
And sends one to the caller
with a message: I am a clairvoyant,
I know who you are
and this is what I do.