Living History
David Ehmcke

After dinner, we walked the streets of a tourist town made regionally famous
for the cheapest hotels near the city whose ruins marked the place

of an ancient war. We’d been arguing about the future. Each conversation
was a reenactment of something old we’d known but some part of one

of us refused. The natural light dimmed, torquing the evening’s tone
until electric lanterns forced a softness on the scene. The night was gauzy.

You could see things that weren’t there, so each step seemed a step
into an imagined past where we played minor characters in a well-known plot.

The next day, at a broken stone gate, a guide told the story
of a sensitive soldier who died in another man’s armor.

The prince who killed him stripped him and took the armor for himself,
an act, I later on a placard read, that put shame and intimacy in concert.