Death’s always in the background in this city where graveyards rise to meet a low sky scarred with steeples and towers, the past is a castle high on hill— to get there, we pass sighing over sluggish water watched by death’s statues and sadness— here and then gone, like my younger self visiting a city that no longer exists, like us, briefly in that old hotel on Wenceslas Square, before the something that held us died—yes, death’s here like the rain dotting the river with her little black dots.