One springtime morning in Cologne,
on business, traveling alone
and walking at an early hour,
I came on Konrad Adenauer.
Copper-cast to human scale,
a statue on a flower trail
that ringed the chapel of a church,
he stood beneath a newgreen birch,
a solid man. He looked at me,
or over me—at Germany
he cast a solemn gaze. Or grim.
For no one seemed to notice him
save one of little consequence,
a stranger in the present tense

like S.T. Coleridge in the past
who walked through rolling shadows cast
beneath the vampire-pocked cathedral,
before this modern tetrahedral
church engaged the student throngs.
Amidst the gargoyles and the gongs
that plague this stinking, stony city,
Coleridge penned a light verse ditty
dark enough to be recited
in a netherworld benighted,
or in a perfumed ivory tower,
or to Konrad Adenauer
on the dark paths of the Rhine
where foul air strokes the Sonnenschein.