The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman,
            Coleridge once noted in his journal.
                        He plucked the line from Shakespeare
 
and the mouth of Poor Tom in King Lear.
            One day I found proof, hiding among
                        some 13,000 musty, old files shelved
 
in the Osobyi Archive of Moscow.
            I trudged through snow, ankle deep,
                        to the Archive, sat in a bone-cold room,
 
dried my hands with discarded newspapers
            stacked on the washroom floor, and poured
                        over documents from the Reich’s Oversight Office
             
of Private Insurance, documents the Soviets
            in 1945, upon their advance through Berlin
                        rubble, seized before Nazi bureaucrats burned
             
them to ash. I found a curiosity, a green file
            with the title Judenfragen, and in the midst
                        of that pressing Jewish Question—(O, the Party
 
had fretted, what to do, what to do)—
            I picked up a letter, typewritten, a bit
                        yellowed, signed in blue ink by the Fürher,
 
a brief note wishing “Happy Birthday”
            to Kurt Schmitt, his economic minister
                        and chief executive of Allianz Insurance.
 
A cordial greeting to precede the genocide
            that followed years later—such courtesy
                        resurrected among ashes. In the blue script
                         
of that letter I saw Berlin, iced and burning,
            and a good portion of the frosted world
                        hiding in a yellow leaf waiting to unhinge.
 
Millions perished in death camps, but a record
            of polite manners survived. If nothing else, let
                        it remind our November bones what they are,
 
an ashen grave of memory where Peace,
            Beauty are buried to revive their own
                        placid weather, regardless of cloud or wind.