by Sean Murphy.
Is it possible Hitler’s depraved accomplice had a sense of humor?
How else to account for those locales
he chose? Unsullied landscapes
unfit for grotesque deeds:
Assailing Nature’s mise-en-scène.
Or did he believe
he was acting in accordance
with his whiter God’s wishes?
Or worse, revamping the rough draft
of a divine architect—with infallible designs
but insufficient resources?
(So many things
to contend with, each second something else
He was obliged to oversee or invent.
We don’t, after all, judge geniuses
by scribbled notes left in drawers,
or the stalled progress of sketches
dropped on laboratory floors.
If not for the intrusions of bland men
with honorable intentions, the red ink
would be erased, a revised text enduring
as the permanent record. So
Successive generations would learn
differently, and revere these consecrated sites
where difficult work got done, inking
black numbers on arms, defiling
the flesh, organizing bodies like so
many library books waiting to be
checked out.)
His aspersive vision:
A new alchemy commissioned
by the uncorrupted hand of History.
A better future freed
from abominations, begging erasure
from a distracted deity
and stern disciples, willing to perfect,
at last, the little things
He lamented not making
less defective—the first time
He tried.