Edgar Bowers

Clear-seeing

The clairvoyante, a major general’ s wife,
The secretaries’ sibyl, read the letters
They brought her from their GI soldier-lovers,
Interpreting the script. I went along
One afternoon with writing of my own.
“This writing is by one you cannot trust,”
She frowned, and all the secretaries smiled.
But when she took my palm, she read the brown
Fingers for too much smoking and the lines
Of time and fate for a long and famous life.
“Soon you will take a trip by land and sea.”
Across the hall, her husband, half asleep

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War & Conflict

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Clothes

Edgar Bowers

Walking back to the office after lunch,
I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,”
He called out in his hurry, “Herr Wegner needs you.
A woman waiting for a border pass
Took poison, she is dead, and the police
Are there to take the body.” In the hall,
The secretaries stood outside their doors
Silently waiting with Wegner. “Sir,” he said,
“It was her answer on the questionnaire,
A clerk for the Gestapo. So it was.”
Within the outer office, by the row
Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side,

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The Poet Orders His Tomb

Edgar Bowers

I summon up Panofskv from his bed
Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,
Suffers the stone’ s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies
Of simple visual ease,
Usurps the place of the complexities
Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

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The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten

Edgar Bowers

All winter long you listened for the boom
Of distant cannon wheeled into their place.
Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon
You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace

Their careful webs against the boding sky,
While miles away on Munich’ s vacant square
The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry
Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear.

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