W G Sebald in NJ

I think he himself said something like his poetry doesn't rise to level of his prose, but this poem is somewhat interesting, especially because it's a companion piece to the story he tells in The Emigrants.

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New Jersey Journey 

Spent two hours at the end of December on the Garden State Highway In the ancient Ford’s trunk nothing but my heart grown heavier year by year 

A protracted catastrophe: the constant river of traffic the endless business of overtaking vicious eye-contact with total strangers in the adjacent lane 

Driven by yearning for its prehistoric brothers a Jumbo climbs out of Newark airport over marshes and lagoons a giant smoking mountain of rubbish and the countless lights of the refineries 

Mile after mile of stunted trees telegraph poles fields of blueberries a Siberian countryside colonized then run to seed with moribund supermarkets abandoned poultry farms haunted by millions and millions of breakfast eggs harboring the undeciphered sighs of an entire nation 

Near the retirement town of Lakehurst a safari park soundless under its coat of frost cemeteries as spacious as the world war killing fields funeral parlors dubious antique shops and a bus station for last trips to Atlantic City 

In the twilight of the settlement itself ten square miles of faintly luminous bungalows lawns dwarf-conifers Christmas decorations Santa Rudolph the Reindeer and in front of one of the houses my uncle feeding the songbirds 

Drinking schnapps he later tells me of the conquest of New York Drinking schnapps I consider the ramifications of our calamity and the meaning of the picture that shows him, my uncle as a tinsmith’s assistant in ’23 on the new copper roof of the Augsburg synagogue those were the days 

Next day we drive out to the coast Seaside Park Avenue at noon the boardwalks deserted boarded up diners Alpine-style summerhouses with circulating draughts yachts rattling in the cold the sub-urban migration of dunes 

With the brown house-high waves in the background my uncle leaning forward into the wind snapped me again with his Polaroid 

Do we really die only once