Charles Fishman

Poems

Eastern Europe after the War

Wisps of memory   ragged dips in the grass

A few years earlier, millions died in sub-zero
temperature     Stripped to their underwear,

they were whipped    beaten with fists
and rifle butts   their infants ripped

from their arms     Their prayers to God
changed nothing     Shot in the neck,

they were kicked   into ditch after ditch
Those still living clutched at prayer shawls

or thrice-blessed amulets   but their words
their tears   called down no power

Their deaths did not alter the sky, which continues
to shelter their murderers     The earth

that churned for days afterward has yielded nothing
but fragments     The years swept by, blurring

the landscape   though, on occasion, something
in humanity   twitched     A list of the names

of the missing   slipped from official fingers
and drifted into history     In Eastern Europe,

not a stitch was mended     The gash
in the abandoned universe   could not be healed

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Counting the Holocaust

He tried to get a handle on the Holocaust:
let others immerse themselves in questions
of time and intention

He would leave the Nazis to history
the endless litany of camps to architects
and statisticians

Let the professors tussle over Hitler's evil
genius   the altruism of Schindler   the German
muse of Goldhagen

He wanted to know one thing only —
what six million of anything added up to . . .
and so he counted:

grains of uncooked rice   until the gallon jugs
he dropped them into filled his kitchen   un-
matched contact lenses

newly-minted pennies   then soda pop bottle caps
battered shoe boxes   abandoned valises   and six
million periods in 12-point Gothic type:

thirty-seven hundred and four unconsumed
pages     He was counting the Holocaust   and he
kept counting.

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Army Doctor, Unit 731
From the testimony of Yuasa Ken

His father had a practice in Shitamachi,
the old district of Tokyo, and a hunger
to be a doctor grew inside him. When the war
knocked at his window, he was ready:
you can’t cure the soon-to-be-dead
without doctors. Dispatched to Shansi

province in China, he flew like a night moth
to the hospital, where the bitter cold
did not daunt him: he was a warrior,
a samurai in a fresh white coat. Still,
he felt his bones go cold and his will waver,
for he knew what manner of death lived there.

At the hospital, he stepped into the circle
of his destiny, where others had gathered,
but only to act out their supporting roles:
he was the one who would follow orders
or issue commands. The smiling Red Cross nurses
had been over this ground before

but never with such a good-looking young doctor,
and their cheerful demeanor made him think:
What if this man tries to flee — if he dies
under the knife, without a last meal or a call
to his family, without his Shansi gods clustered
around him? He thought these things, but they

were not his concern. If he did not practice
on the living, how would he learn? He would not
lose heart with everyone watching and made the log
lie down: he would not be embarrassed by weakness.
The anesthetic took effect, but the appendix
was hard to locate, and the opening of the pharynx

was a puzzle to resolve, like the opening of a gate
in a walled garden. When this prisoner was neatly
dissected, yet would not die, he, Yuasa Ken, watched
the director of the hospital inject air into his heart.
This was the first time he understood the power
that lived in his uniform, in his surgeon’s tools,

in his hands, and each incision he made after this
seemed easier. He practiced sewing up intestines
that had slipped from living bodies, and he watched
as the dentist excised healthy teeth as the urologist

scalpeled testicles, and he took pride in these things:
he was a loyal servant of the Japanese nation.

Gradually, he came to enjoy his accomplishments
and, in town, would swing his shoulders: the girls loved
his swagger, and all the local men deferred to him —
everyone admires an officer! The city moved
with the merest rise in his voice, with the merest dip.
Sake overflowed his cup.

* * *

After the war, he had eleven years to think, but then
he was released from prison, and the nurses
who had served with him took his face in their hands:
their words were softer and more fragrant than cherry
blossoms torn and scattered by the wind. But an old pain
flooded him, and he asked them to remember:

they had been with him at Shansi. Hadn’t they
held down his victims and complained, Sleep, sleep —
drug give!, in that parody of Chinese? Didn’t they feel
the same shudder he felt rush through them now,
as if death had brushed their hearts?

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Names on a List
January 23, 1995

David Ben-Zino, Adi Rosen, Damian Rosovski —
Who were these soldiers Islamic Jihad killed?
In Tel Aviv I had slept in a young soldier’s room
— my shirts hung for a while in his closet,
my head crushed his pillow, and my feet
drank the chill from his floor. Was he
among the murdered, this only son of my friends?

No, he was not in Netanya in the third week
of January, he was not in Tel Aviv, not
in Israel, not in the Middle East at all.
Then let us not speak his name, not even
in a whisper: who are we to trust the gods
or the unseen powers? My friends shall keep
their son, and I will sleep without dreaming.

But who were these young soldiers? Rafael
Mizrahi, Yehiel Sharvit, Yuval Tuvya — how did
they live and what did they live for? A month
earlier, in Jerusalem, I saw two soldiers at ease
at the Haas Promenade. They were there to guard
children and the teachers of these children
and Uzis hung at their backs in stark diagonals.

They looked like soldiers, but I could see
they were really older brothers and would-be
boyfriends, and one joked with the teacher
whose clouds of copper hair outshone the midday
sun; the other ate his lunch and half-sprawled
in the scorched grass. I saw their sisters
and cousins in the Judean Desert, in the spillway

of light that opened into dark, conflicted Jericho,
and they were waiting in the alleyways of the Old
City where tribes of tourists materialized from stone
and filled their arms with Yemenite jewelry and Druse
cloth. I understand, but who was Gilad Gaon? who
Eran Gueta? who was David Hasson? who Eitan Peretz?
I saw them in Abu Ghosh, wolfing down hummus

in olive oil, small hills of falafel. And they
were at the bus terminal in Tel Aviv, hauling
their battered duffels   at the Bahá’í shrine in Haifa
keeping watch in the sacred gardens   and I saw
them anointed with fire in the sunset that blossomed
over Ashkelon. But you know these words are lies
and your hearts are not fooled by my stories

for Yaron Blum is dead   Ilie Dagan is dead
Amir Hirschenson is dead   Anan Kadur is dead
Maya Kopstein is dead   Soli Mizrahi is dead
Avi Salto is no longer with us   Daniel Tzikuashvili
is no longer with us     All the bright young flames
of Israel’s sun are dying   and I am here speaking
their names to you.

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Praying for My Sister
This earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.
—Bahá’u’lláh

     1
I went to Acco and prayed for my sister.
It was a bleak day in January, the northernmost coast
of the kingdom. The bus ride from Jerusalem took hours.
What is a day to the heart that seeks absolution?
I had taken this duty on myself: I would stand in the Báb’s garden
where Haganah soldiers had been murdered by the British;
I would speak for her words of hope and comfort.

This was the realm of passionate martyrdom,
and I would read from Bahá’í scripture, The Fire Tablet
and The Seven Valleys. It was late afternoon and the sky
was rapidly darkening — soon there would be rain.
No one stood with me in this haunted place, but I reached out
to my sister through these words; I reached out to her God
for her, as the cool drops fell . . . and I felt the spirit of my sister
touch my lips, the breath of an old Spirit graze my cheek.

     2
In Haifa, too, I prayed for her: at the great temple,
under the gold-leafed dome. Deep in the sacred gardens,
the sea stirred the ramparts; light blossomed
on the ripening fruit. I took off my shoes and entered.
The quiet approached me.

I prayed for my sister there. I asked for Bahá’u’lláh’s blessing
to descend on her like cool rain, to sweeten her days
with the scent of lush blossoms. In that small chapel,
I could not tell if the Earth had, at last, become one country,
but I knew that my sister should be minister of a world at peace.

     3
I prayed for my sister in Acco and Haifa, and I prayed
for her again at the Wall, for this was the place
where the power of life fully spoke to me, where history
and heaven seemed entwined. I prayed for her
in the Judean hills, where the zealots had known God
through the strength of community and isolation;
at Stella Carmel, where Christian missionaries offered Christ
to my wandering heart (and where I said grace for them
in my heart’s best Hebrew). I spoke to my sister words barely spoken,
until what I murmured to myself felt like the sweetest blessing.

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A Child of the Millennium

He’s five months old now — a little short
on experience — but if he could speak,
Jake would sit with the Dalai Lama on a red
and golden throne and hold forth on happiness
and compassion on freeing the mind from vengeance
and regret and living in exile from the sacred home:
he’s seen the end of days . . . and the beginning.

He doesn’t know about race or gender
or that we are murdering the planet that the earth
is smoldering with underground fires and with the bone-
fires of hatred He doesn’t know about ethnicity
or religion and will not take with him into the new century
memories of calcined corpses or an interior landscape
peopled with napalmed children.

What Jake is best at has nothing to do with genocide
or the acid tides of history He travels in realms
where tenderness is a face that brushes his face
He feels the strength of those around him and their love
and time ticks at his wrist like the gentlest rain His eyes
are the most translucent lakes, his smiles tiny suns
that shine a clear light on the living.

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“Though taking place over a half century ago, the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima become as alive as yesterday's rain in Mr. Fishman's able depictions based on the testimony, witness, and memory of those with a terrible knowledge and experience. Humanity's brutality is also explored in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the death of Lorca, and violence in the Holy Land. Grim subjects all. The art is in the telling: a simple declarative tone mixed with vivid imagery; a style of calculation: dare to turn your face and heart away while the poet rivets you with a storyteller's skill. —Iconoclast, September 2006

In the Woods, 1951

I remember how the light pawed down
through densely tangled branches
and how the narrow creek jangled
over its scatter of burnished stones
worn to a smoothness in the cold churn
of water. The day began when school ended

and our feet sank into fern banks
and leaf-mulch or squelched in bog-holes
of aromatic muck. We leapt over moss-
crushed oaks white-barked paper birches
climbed wind-sheared hickories and beeches

and, in the green drench of summer,
swam naked in our garden. In that clear water
that granted every pardon, we gashed our hearts
and came up gasping, the afternoon sun

encircling our foreheads with tendrils of molten gold.
We heard drums in the leaf-tops that spoke of endings,
yet we lived as if time was not our master, as if

we were kings of the forest and not its slowly drowning sons.

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Learning to Dance, 1956

It was the 50s, and all of us
were kids, but you were older —
almost a woman — and you would

teach me to dance. You were
the dark-haired child in a family
of blondes, slightly exotic, wilder,

my best friend’s sister.
In your father’s basement,
you took my hand and showed me

how to hold you — how to hold
a woman. I was fourteen and knew
already how to be awkward. You knew

I was falling into shadows. When I breathed
your hair, I was no longer in the forest
but had broken through

to a clearing where tall grasses whispered
and swayed, where white-petalled daisies
and violet clover blossomed.

You moved me deeper into the music
and made a meadow spring up around me.
Your body showed me that I had strength

to change the moment, if only the quiet
power of a summer breeze . . .
When you said I would be a good dancer,

that I had rhythm that I could swing,
I held you close: some day,
I would find the one

who would pull me near to her in love,
not mercy; I would dance with her
and learn her secret names.

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A Summer Night

Dark country night,
how clearly I remember you:
grass on fire with darkness
the summer sky streaming
with meteors
and slow-burning flares
at the tips of cigarettes
gripped in my parents’ hands
the cold flames of ice
in their drinks glinting
as if from the signal fires
of distant stars

Such a warm summer night,
I wanted to breathe the darkness
to listen to the sizzling sparks
of words   that lifted
from those adult and familiar mouths
to dream as ice made a soft clinking
in each glass     I wanted to crawl
through the black flames
of the grass   to feel the earth
slowly warm beneath me
I wanted to be bathed
in that radiance

But Father said it was high time
I was sleeping neatly tucked
into that nest of cotton blankets
It was time for me to sleep, said Mother
— wasn’t it long past the hour when a child
falls silent? And so I was sent to bed
in the embered darkness for flames
of the summer night
had entered the cottage with me
the dark beauty of the country night
had wound like a bright mist
around my life

And I called out in anger
through the dark window
to my parents who nursed
their drinks who drew blue wisps
of smoke from their floating fingers
and spoke with the husky intonations
of oracles to their summer friends
I called out I called out to them,
for these were the beings
who had showered me with perception
and I did not dream I was no longer
safe

But then the cottage door
banged open
and I heard the fall of her foot on the stair
and I knew a darkness I did not know
had come in with her   and I hid
under the silent blankets where I
forgot to breathe     And she swung her arm
as she scolded me
for filling the night with my voice
so that the buckle on my father’s belt
                   flashed
in the too-still darkness   flashed

as its brassy edge caught
the bridge of my nose   flashed again
as it sent cold fire
down my mother’s flesh
and again   as Father lifted me
from the bed   where my first screams
lingered     And then they saved me
with vinegar poured on the flaring wound
they saved me   with a torn flag
of ordinary brown paper
they saved me   with the cold torch
of their love

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What the End Was Like

All I could see was my mother’s broken face.
It had the dry pallor of a desiccated leaf.
I forced myself to look closer, to stare

at the pale lashes that barely clung
to the lids, at the thin lips that had lost
all color. Her brow was mottled snow, her nose

a slender drift of whiteness. The breath still lived
in my mother’s mouth, and a few last words
tried to form there. I leaned nearer

to the bed where her soul was unhooking itself
from each bone where the white spark of her life
was preparing for departure. I saw her shiver then

and knew that the darkness of space had entered her.
The black ice of the universe had entered her.
The tips of my fingers burned.

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Late Spring Quickens

After a month of rain,
I ride my bike to the beach
and give myself to the wind

blowing in from the Atlantic.
It’s late in the day, too cool
to sit and read. Swings

in the make-shift playground
hang empty yet drift to right
and left, as if ghost children

sit in them, waiting for a push,
for that first swift launch
out of ordinariness

into the ocean of new life.

I walk the tidal sift at the edge
of this sunless bay, listening
for the quick trilled notes

of the blackbird’s song
the whispered epic of the reeds
the deft music the buffeting wind makes

It’s good to be silent and alone
where fate’s hammer may not strike.
Someone else walked this way today

and saw the luminous spill of the waves
the combed hair of the rocks   moss-green
in late spring sunlight   tide-wrack

of smashed lobster pots on the eroded beach.

Here is the sill of the world
where each cold shimmer comforts
and rebukes.

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Ghosts

God cannot be directly the cause
of sin, either in Himself or in another . . .
— Aquinas, Summa Theologica

I've heard it said that lives
are valueless as smoke,
that only God survives
the poisoned drink of death.

And yet I count these ghosts
and think of one who died
with a young child at her breast,
unnoticed and unmourned.

The ditch was nearly filled
with people she had loved
and it flared before her eyes
like the lips of a mortar wound.

Only her child seemed to know
how quickly time could run:
he himself was the sun
aflame in his mother's arms.

Only her child seemed to know:
here time would cease forever.
They tore him from her throat,
and then it was her turn.

And then it was her turn —
she heard the loud report —
again! again! again!
until her soul went deaf.

All night she lay with the bones —
here, where the Old World ended:
Aquinas mute as a bug
and God with his left wrist branded.

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A Child Survivor
For Arthur Kurzweil

With the help of a Catholic
woman, one of the righteous
among the nations, she escaped
from the blazing furnace of Warsaw.

For 18 years, she was protected
even loved   but it was only when a nun
let the truth flare under the sun
that the child — long since become

a lovely young woman —listened
and learned. Yet that other world
remained unapproachably distant —
the dark side of her private moon —

for the child she had been
lived only in whispers   in fleeting dreams
in the unilluminated space of a lost galaxy
in the billionth billionth lightyear

of the heart. Only after marriage
and the birth of her own child —
that miracle of history and continuance —
could she feel in her blood

the true worth of the gift her mother
had given her: she was a Jew
who had survived.

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My Mother's Candlesticks

My mother couldn't read Hebrew
but she knew the value of things
That's why she saved newspapers
until the pages turned brittle
and the newsprint broke into flakes
and why she kept old friendships burning
long after her friends were dead:
anything worth reading would speak to her
next year   and true friends would never tire
of listening     My mother loved those candlesticks
and kept them polished faithfully   yet she
did not kindle their fire     Neither silver nor gold,
they had come down to her from her mother's —
from her grandmother's — hands   tarnished
pitted   the last brassy patina gone     The cups
were akilter   the wobbly bottoms would not align
but these battered objects could hold two candles
My mother knew the blessing once   far back
in her girlhood   but the flames blew out
when her mother died     These flames
that glimmer still   in Malaga   Thessaloniki
Berlin     These flames that are the ancient news
of our people     These flames that await the match
in my fingers   and the Barukh atah on my lips.

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St. Catherine of Siena

I am she who is not. And if I should claim to be
anything of myself, I should be lying through my teeth!
—The Dialogue

     I
On a country road, she saw Jesus. Only six,
she felt the world stop for her and draw her
out of time: in the bleak gray-streaked
north Italian sky, Christ sat in glory on his throne.
A year later, she knew she would be His bride
and entered the region of prayer and silence:

her family faded to shadow and solitude
wrapped her close. This separateness was a gift
she had not looked for, a sentient delight,
and she saw this movement inward with perfect
clarity, as if a cross of illuminated stones
had been set in the earth for her

and, at twelve, she sheared her gold-brown hair
and took a vow not to yield to the will of her parents:
she swore off jewels, gowns, silken tresses.
The sinuous threads of the marriage bed would not
bind her. When they punished her with menial chores,
with forced companionship, she bit down on her tongue.

Finally, she was given a small, cold, dark cell
where she could fast and pray. Instead of satin,
she wore horse hair cropped close to the skin,
so that it tore at her milky body. Instead of petticoats
and pinafores, she clasped to her soft breast
an iron-spiked bodice. And, at sixteen,

when nearly all of her childhood’s delicacy and sweetness
had been bled from her, she put on the black habit
of the Dominicans, as if she were a widow and not
the bride of God. And she went deep into desert stillness
but not as that Jewish wanderer had, in rough sandals
and a burnoose of white linen — not as He, to linger

in solitude under dazzling tapestries of night’s Egyptian
skies. Her departure from the sensory riches of the world
from the sweet pampering of flesh a simple day permits
took her instead into ever more stark yet intimate silences
where she pledged body and bone to her savior: her strength
and patience, her blood and spirit — His.

     II
As a child, she had known such pleasure in sunlight,
in the fragrance of food in the trills and tremolos
of laughter, she was for a time called by her mother
Euphrosyne — and the grace of joy had been hers:
the parti-colored shapes of the planet had spoken to her
had revealed to her the aura of a hidden realm,

kingdom with no earthly king heaven with no earthly sun.
Most of her life, she supped on the sanctified wafer
her drink the holy spirit. What sleep she had rose up
and departed from her in obedience to her will.
What daylight she allowed herself she dedicated
to caring for the destitute—the most disheartening

cases — the repulsive the maimed the incurably ill.
At twenty, during an outbreak of plague, she soothed
the stricken and buried them with her own hands.
She saved many, who otherwise would have gone out
of the darkened world a multitude of pale and flickering
flames. Soon there was a quickening of converts,

an ecstatic dance of souls that fell like leaves ripped
from wind-raked branches but that fell singing.
Because she denied herself rest and sumptuousness,
spiritual knowledge coursed through her — streamlets of dark
sweet wine. Bright and fragile as a lily, she spoke with passion
and acuity. Pope Gregory listened to her words.

     III
Five years before her death, she took communion
in the little church of St. Christina in Pisa and watched
as 5 blood-red rays streamed from the cross: 5 rays of light
with the dark radiance of blood 5 stars that shone down on her
and burned her 5 nails of light that pierced her —

hands feet and heart — so that she would be afire forever now,
though these wounds would remain invisible until her death.
Knowing this, who wouldn’t call on her, Catherine Benincasa,
to safeguard her health to shield his house against burning?
On her advice, the papal court abandoned Avignon

and Rome blossomed again as a garden for the spirit.
At 33, she rose up to regions of untrammelled light,
yet her body remained in the purgatory of living beings
who washed her and severed part from part, for Siena alone
could not own her for each fiefdom of Italy would savor
who she was.

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Three Modern Tragedies

1. A Central Park Killing
The two teen-age suspects in the slashing death of a man found floating
in the lake in Central Park . . . tried to cut off the victim’s hands. . . .
— New York Times Metro Section (1997)

How can we tell who is guilty in such a tangle?
Should we blame the dead, a real estate salesman
with a hankering for cheap beer and teen-angels,
or must the blame fall to the delirious who outlive him —
the deluded, the dim-of-spirit? In this late twentieth-century
pastoral, the ex-altar boy and his delinquent mistress,
both 15, take out a mild-mannered alcoholic, marred,
it would seem, by a slight preference for darkness
and the untamed.

                        *   *   *

So it would seem. They shared a bond, these three,
and a few simple acts — boozing, robbery, murder —
would deepen it. Oh, starry night under the trees,
Upper East Side! Who did the slashing, hacking, kicking,
stabbing; who cut through one of the victim’s hands; and who
sawed his intestines loose from the sac of his body?
Surely, the teens would lie to save themselves, or to save
each other, for such collusion would confuse. What jury
could decipher the code of their culpability?

                        *   *   *

Here are the facts: Christopher had served God
at St. Frances De Sales church, but when he met Daphne,
his heart thumped in his chest and the sweet fragrance
of Christ drifted back, until he could smell only the incense
of her hair, hear only the bells of his own blood ringing.
He was cut from the disappearing raft of his parents’ bodies
and lifted his hands to touch the sky in Daphne’s face.
And she: hadn’t she been falling for a few centuries?
Hadn’t she met Michael at the Central Dantesque Ballet,
at the Church of the Lapsed, the Lost, the Self-Abusers?
And wasn’t the name of Michael’s place of business, Surreality?

                        *   *   *

Who is guilty? Who can we blame? Was the deceased
hitting on young Daphne or was he merely obtuse and innocent?
Was Christopher lashed on by his laurel nymph or driven to maim
only by the pulse of his senses? And we — which mirror
can we turn to for insight or vision? Let us proceed with caution,
we members of the jury. For aren’t we, too, dazed and unlucky
children? Haven’t we sought to hide the evidence here,
in Strawberry Fields? And doesn’t the moonlight shine down on us,
the rootless and unloved?

2. Prom Night
Freehold, NJ — in the marble-tiled ladies’ room at the catering hall,
a maintenance worker was making a horrible discovery. . . .
—AP Report (1997)

The music played at the high school prom
and spirits were high. She was sweet and white
and dark-haired, like a heroine in a 50s movie.
Let her request a song: there is time to dance
before the baby arrives, before the light grows dim
and the night is over.

The music played and her black dress swirled;
then the life inside her fell through time, through
quarks, black holes, and nebulae, through galaxies,
X-rays, and cosmic dust: a new star emerged in space,
bathed in his mother’s blood.

The music played, but she lost her smile: a darkness
welled and claimed her life — her child’s life, too.
Did you watch her go to the restroom stall? And did
you see that blood on the walls, on the neat tile floors,
on the bone-white toilet? Did you see her dress
trailing its blackness?

The music played, but her baby would forever sleep.
He lay unbreathing in a trash-can grave, and she
walked dead back to the prom. And she walked dead,
for flowers hung from the eaves at home, where she
would never sleep again. Her black dress swirled;
she requested a song.

3. The Second Shot
Schodack, NY — A teenager hailed as a hero after carrying
his friend to safety last month shot the same friend to death
in what authorities described as a tragic hunting accident.
—AP Report (1995)

These boys were used to horsing around, were real
boys: loyal, tough, competitive, brave to the verge
of stupidity and self-destruction. All this, and noisy, too,
the way walruses and howler monkeys are — such good cheer
in that turned-up volume, the radio of their hearts
pumping out chorus after chorus of near-mindless but rollicking song.

As always, one boy was the leader: he climbed highest,
biked fastest, was always more daring than the rest. Give him an A
for audacity, for he would ascend until he dropped, he would
acknowledge no master — not even the sun would be his god.
And, one day, he would save his brother but, another,
by pure accident, would shoot him in the head.
And the true friend would be dead.

                        *   *   *

So much rides on the smallest gesture! Last month, David,
you carried Michael to safety after he’d been stung by yellow jackets
and had plunged into shock. The mayor, rightly, hailed you
as a hero, but Fortune’s wheel still turns . . . And, this month,
your aim was off. The squirrel you had meant to kill, at the last
leaping moment, kept running after the trigger was pulled,
and you took the shot that ripped apart your world.

                        *   *   *

This is painful history to tell, for don’t we know — too well —
how deeply we are wounded, how narrowly we miss
taking the second shot at all we love? David, what do the gods
intend when two children slay and mutilate their friend,
when a young woman murders her just-born child, or when
a hero like yourself ends up sunk in grief, all his sweet work rent
by a single misaimed shell?

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European Movements

Córdoba to Hamburg   Bordeaux to
Strasbourg   Marseilles to Rome   Bucharest
to Belgrade   Kalisz to Lublin   Vienna to
Kishinev   Cracow to Lvov   Nomads,
why so restless? Did you hear the voice
of Midsummer lightning? All that back-
breaking portage: Granada to Corfu   Genoa
to Salonika, tireless! Always hurrying
from one black patch to another: Cologne
to Bialystok   Prague to Kiev   Lisbon to
Amsterdam   Tallinn to Polotsk: ceaseless
in your translations! Dear malcontents,
unsettled on dark nights under the moon
of horses: Soncino to Posen   Chernigov
to Frankfurt   Avignon to Tarnopol   Berdichev
to Worms   Exiles! Black Sea transports
Crimea Express   Zhitomir to Copenhagen
Helsinki to Antwerp   Starodub to Brest
whirling lights clustered at Satmar   in
the galaxy of Warsaw   starstreams   time
travelers on the dead continent   wrapped
in languages   in the Law's endless bindings
Why didn't you stay put in the whale's
belly? Why didn't you pull the white sky
of silence over your heads? Did the golden
bells of Chelmno charm you? the meadow flowers
of Majdanek bend their fiery cups? Did you
rise to the black psalteries of Ravensbrück?
Wanderers! such desire for a life of Christian
culture! such anointings with sacred oils,
bathings in blessed waters!

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Landscape after Battle
For Andrzej Wajda

To a nocturne accompaniment —
Chopin — they perform Liberation.
As they starved to Vivaldi.
As they burned to Bach.

You ask us to remember when a corpse
was esteemed 'incompletely processed'
that could not, of itself, rise
above the ashfields . . . and dance.

Andrzej, you understand the silence
of your poets: self-hate and catechetical
obedience; violent, unassimilable grief.

Life should taste sweet, milk warm
from the nipple, but in your language
it is salt and blood.

You give us a victim to remind us why we speak.

Her name is Nina and — offkey — she sings,
and we are moved by her bare legs
and her loose hair, and we are almost
ready to follow . . . Red leaves

build soft mounds under the emptying trees

Poland, here is your Jew!
She will swallow the wafer, translucent
as pale skin, and kiss your numb body
— unkosher meat!

And she will draw you out of your Christ-
blazoned prison, until each bloodied finger
wakens from its dream, until your strangled
voice bears witness:

One life is history enough to mourn.

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The Death Mazurka

It was late — late in the silence —
yet a mangled tune still rose
as if from a needle trapped
in a warped and spinning groove:
an inarticulate moan
fragmented out of sense
but insistent it be known.

Footfalls turned me around:
a troupe of dancers spun
and kicked and dipped as one —
three score minus one,
and that one danced alone.
I watched them skip and prance
but followed only her.

And yes, the drum was swift
and kept a lively beat,
and violins sang sweet
then stridently miaoued —
a mocking sliding note.
She alone danced on
uncoupled, incomplete.

But the trumpets shrilled their tongues
and the saxophones crooned deep
and cymbals scoured the night
to a clashing brassy gleam.
How the women's earrings shined!
like sparks from a whirling fire
that never would be ash.

Then the men whisked off their hats
and bowed to the slide trombone
as though it sat enshrined.
But still she danced alone
at the edge of the wheeling ring:
I could feel the horizon tilt
when she veered close to me.

Then she turned then I then the night
blew back forty years:
I stood in a desolate place,
a reservoir of death
— I could kneel anywhere and drink!
Yes, here was the shul in its bones
and here Judenrein Square

and here a few scorched teeth
from some martyred, unknown saint.
The sky was a scroll of pain
— each star a sacred name!
I saw through time in that light.
But I turned and blood rained down
and I turned and dipped and drank

and could not take my fill:
I yearned to find her there.
And I turned toward darkness again
where dancers in masks like skulls
twirled in smoke and fire,
whirled in fire and smoke.

Now! screamed the violins.
And she was near as my heart
as we clasped each other and turned.
And Now! they shrieked. And Now!

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A Camp Song Newly Heard

Once there was Elzunia.
She is dying all alone,
Because her daddy is in Maidanek,
And in Auschwitz her mommy . . .

Elzunia's remains,
scrawled on a card, sewn
into a coat pocket . . .

1943. The rest of her song
is blood, though we know
the tune to sing: "A Spark
Is Twinkling on the Ash Grate."
A spark is glowing

on the page that keeps
Elzunia' s words —
a voice long dead is heard,
a voice from the fire cries

because her mommy in Auschwitz
died, and in Maidanek her daddy,
because she died alone,
because she was Elzunia.

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A Dream of the Morning

Her body was feverish then cold
so that she tossed all night
and tango’d with the covers as if
she danced in her sleep which
left her sleepless as if she was being
spun on a slow spit that hovered
over fire then over lakes
of ice-blue water

It was not sleep but a descent
into dark fathoms and sudden risings
out of the deepest currents:
immersions in the cells of growth
and memory where she could not
think but where access to delight
and fear to attainment and longing
were unimpeded

Then those swift surfacings above
the flames and a waking
that was not yet wakefulness
but clarity and freedom as if the heavy
coffin lid that had closed down her life
had been lifted Her eyes were open
though her body slept unstirring at last
in the early hours of morning

She could see her body exposed
and vulnerable as a small boat
on the sea of blankets She could see
her face illuminated in morning’s first
untinctured light She was not
dreaming but watched herself
drift in the tide that rocked her

It was like watching a still image
from the film of her existence
like viewing the trailer for an epic
thatæafter all these yearsæremained
in production And so she crossed over
and made that journey that was
something different from travel
or translation

There, in that sweet-smelling wood
where sunlight rose like a mist
from the earth that was moist
and verdant she found the one
her soul loved also adrift and wandering
and then her hand was in his their lips
submerged in kisses and for a split
second she was whole

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A Lost Language
For Natalia Sangama
Pampa Hermosa, Peru

She dreams in Chamicuro
but remembers to speak
in Spanish or no one
will understand her

The lake that floats
near her village — a deeper azure
than the sky — without her words,
no one will fully know it:

what poisons and obscures
can not open the shining leaves

She dreams in Chamicuro as her
ancestors did but she is the last
to feel this tongue in her mouth
the last for whom exact meaning

can not be expressed in Spanish
Who is this grandmother but the lost
soul of Peru and the Amazon
unwilling to vanish?

In her thatched hut, she can swing
her grandchildren and laugh

but she can’t keep out the pulse
of salsa or stop the Spanish sun
from entering like a powerful vine
that winds around her throat

She will be next to die to wither
into brittle twigs of imagery
Her grandchildren will recall a lake
but it will have no name in Chamicuro.
__________________________________

When she was a girl, missionaries made the Chamicuro
children kneel when they used their language. At least
half the world’s 6,000 languages will die out in this century.

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She Remembers Winter

1
She remembers the overpass
along Sunrise Highway
where she would sled all day
with friends in that winter
of 1970: how the sled would freeze
in late December coldness
making it hard to steer, the way
her feet extended over the wooden slats
and her stomach and chest pressed
flat to them so she could breathe
only in shallow gasps as the wet snow
raced under her, how she would put
her whole being into turning
as momentum built and each small
adjustment became necessary

She remembers that downhill rush
as her first lesson in freedom:
how her heart raced with the sled
and beat with a frantic pleasure
that opened gates inside her.
It was heaven to let go, to feel
briefly supported yet unable
to control speed or direction,
to be lifted in a gentle rocking flow
or bumped along roughly
but released from confinement
and stricture, bruised and cold
but brushed with glittering whiteness

She remembers how she played
all day with friends that winter
at ease with herself and the weather,
proud of her white snowjacket and its
black buckles, in love with her
stocking cap and its rainbow colors,
and at one with the fleece-lined boots
whose scuffed toes she dug
into the hard-packed snow: how
the boots, cap and jacket — and cupfuls
of hot chocolate — had kept her
from totally freezing.

2
It all comes back like a rush
down a long white hill and she
remembers, two decades later,
mothering her own children
as if they’d been precious jewels
she’d misplaced in winter snow,
as if they’d been snow angels
whose ice-cold toes and fingers
she would hold to her racing heart
to her stove-warm body.

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For Ilan Halimi
kidnapped & tortured by French Muslims
Paris, January-February 2006

We do not call our dead shaheeds.
They do not blow up planes or babies
or leap into flames to fly to the heavens,
not for sex with a dead universe
of virgins not for all the davening rabbis
of the holy land and not for God.

You, Ilan, will be recalled as a victim,
one more death in millennia-long caravans
of the martyred that trail from Babylonia
to Jerusalem and back. Your body
was more brutalized than many,
but little children in Treblinka and Ponary

were treated worse: nothing is left of them
but our will to remember: no bones, no
headlines, no somber marches in the halal cities
of Eurabia. Because you were tortured in French
and Arabic, you will be a symbol, but the children
did not grow into their names. What is the meaning

of such cruelty to us, who were born in the shadow
of Shoah? We who remain alive will mourn you
as a brother or as a son who left us wounded,
maimed on a highway, blind and deaf in a wood,
burnt and abandoned again, Ilan, by the God
in whom we ache to believe.