Found to be Borrowed from Some Material Appearance 1
       

I.

She was reading a newspaper article about the Amber Room, stolen from Russia by the
Nazis and found sixty years later buried in the Czech Republic, and thought of her own amber
rooms, stolen by others and by herself, buried and never to be found throughout the Sudetenland
of her body. The developers were inking deals, the ATMs were dispensing their usual neat stacks,
the trams were depositing their pensive cargo all over the city.

2.

The most accurate chronometer in the sixteenth century? The hourglass. It was like the
aftermath of a day at the beach: sand had gotten into everything, and for days afterward he kept
finding it in his clothes, his hair, between the pages of his books. After the fall of the wall, they
quickly buried the gigantic carved Lenin head in sand on the outskirts of the city. She sat down at
her computer and typed in www.cabinetdecuriosites.com.

3.

How time spells itself out in gradations of green, aging centuries from early spring to late
summer, fluorescent chartreuse April lawns darkening into bottle-green renunciations, late
August oak leaves almost mahogany with the tarnishing concessions of the summer. Three star
architects decided to join forces on a state-of-the-art planetarium. "People are basically good" is
an American truism that Americans think is a universal truism.

4.

Over the years, the massive carved Lenin head was remembered from time to time, dug
back up, put in a film or exhibition, and then reburied. When he published his new book, she saw
that he had carefully excised all the dedications to her which had once sat atop many of the
poems. Each day at three the man went and sat in the lobby of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam,
hoping it was possible to absorb genius through genius loci.

5.

Time seemed to understand itself best in the tiny dock-repair shop he had to rush past
every day in his haste to be on time for work. Night was falling, and the people all sat quietly in
their living rooms, wondering if the future had any candy in its purse. And the next evening
other people, people who had seemed intact as pomegranates, began spilling seeds of grief,
loneliness, and despair all over the redeveloped plaza.

6.

They were so jumpy, those Indian summer days: he said "terrace" and they all heard
"terrorist" They didn't know why the summer was "Indian." They knew that "boulevard" came
from "bulwark." The trucks rumbled by all night, depositing construction materials at the new
developments. Her husband hinted that her poems were too precious, so she wrote fa.ck in one,
which her father discovered, and threw her book into the trash.

7.

The terraced mountains had nothing to tell us, the guard dogs let loose in the high-grassed
paths troubled our luxurious little landscape studies. He read that the cash-strapped city was
going to unbury the Lenin head for good and charge money to see it in a museum. At the dinner
party she felt shy and thought of Cecile Sarkozy, who, when asked how she felt about moving
into the Elysee Palace, remarked she was "bored stiff" by the idea.

8.

The water was so restful. It was the only thing that everyone that fucked-up summer
could agree on. Nothing can be built on water, to the immense chagrin of the developers,
masturbating in their offices to tinny new techno-pop, thinking up names like "Fox Hunter's
Pointe" and "Inglewood Estates." Built based on the utopian principles of New Babylon, the
Metastadt had fallen apart within fifteen years of its erection.

9.

The emotion bottling up in the champagne Marxist was either going to explode,
skyrocketing him into the stratosphere, or sink him like a stone in his Gucci jeans. There were
fates worse than being too clever by half, such as being insipid in spades. Or being a head buried
and reburied in sand. We hated the developers, true, but that didn't mean as soon as we got any
money we wouldn't buy the fanciest new apartment we could.

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Copyright © 2018 Donna Stonecipher All rights reserved
from Transaction Histories
University of Iowa Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission