I To recognize the unwelcoming places where you grewup in another land before the last century was through:a fruitless stretch of dunes, willows, a warehouse wallby the shore will hardly recall who lived here at all.The lonely rushed through these streets with a taxi and threecarriages, while orangeade dripped on park paths. At three-thirty,German girls gathered on the other side of the tracks,saying Süsses Kind over the strollers along their path.They yearned for the empire’s signs, walked the yellowsand, and applauded the shadow on the balcony in the oldtown, until their hairdos, hats, and rings were sunkin bland waters by Marinescu in his victorious sub.  II There is more to the landscape: importantly—the skyand the piercing waves that gaze right into its eye,smokestacks, stork-nest poles, willows sparselyscattered along the lower banks of the canal,the stink of flatfish, the wind rocking a shabbyyacht by the bridge. I see the teacher, holding his key,returning from the Red Cross for a nap—he gazes joylessly over his temporary flat:laundry hung to dry in the garret, shutters knocking,plaster peeling (onto the cradle?), bookshelves leaningfrom Marxist tomes, and beyond the Danė river, he sees,like a monotonous echo, timber frame homes recede.  III The clatter of hooves—spoons and faience ring in answer.The eye can spot a low Anglican church by the harbor.Its roof is like the cover of an earthenware jar.Nothing further. Europe’s threshold or boundary—these flat shores, these swamps, fertilized equallyby the bones of Skalvians, Old Prussians, Vistula Veneti.Catalogues of the past: nach Osten, Westen, one flees—ships are sunk, the implacable weight of the seapresses mustard gas drums. An irresistible current:its echo bursts repeatedly on the desolate grassy fort.And so the limpid reflection below a frozen skiff gleamsin morning cold, clearer than the skiff itself, it seems—  IV so deep, like a voice hardly recognized in a dreambut which, in repeating a pointless sound, can meanmore than the people to whom one speaks. A nymph,un-sleeping Echo, reigns over the world that is left.Above the vanished city of my birth, from Bothnianskerries to Skagerrak, from the fuming EasternCape to Spit’s End, a clear rhythm, as from a trumpet,sails out beyond us, announcing the Last Judgment:it will wake us in the dark, lead us home from imprisonment,so that we might be thankful for everything—even whentime erases all shape and gesture, like an experiencedcensor, from the sheet of paper, the photo, and the text.