Two Poems 1 comments

Richard Michelson

Another Holocaust Poem

I

I watch them enter, lined up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly,
and after the teacher, counting, passes, one pushes and the one pushed
begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in 1942,
I tell the behaved ones, orderly and under orders, and I’m just about to start
that terrible story, the one they don’t yet know, when I pause to open the door,
as I always do, for a little air. And there they are again, arms akimbo,
like two stooges, the Angel of Death and the Angel of Forgetfulness,
those vaudeville comics, those incorrigible face-making kids,
stuck forever—you first—no you—in the undersized doorframe
of the museum I will, for lack of a better word, call childhood.

II

Did I say angels? Clearly I meant my great aunts whom you haven’t
yet met. My sister called them Aunt From-This-You-Shouldn’t-Know
and Aunt May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred, at Pesach, Horseradish
and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich I munched between prayers.
Everyone I knew was still alive, and no one cared that in Venice,
that very summer, Ginsberg, in the name of the Jews, forgave Pound.
Hadn’t I forgone my own bar mitzvah for a weekend in Miami Beach
where that borscht-belt-south social director and shuffleboard champ
first shticked There’s Noah business like Shoah business, soon after
Lillian Hellman ushered her de-judaicized Anne Frank onto the stage?

III

Are you writing another Holocaust poem, my son asks?
He’s gauging my anger level at this interruption—a love sonnet, less so?—
but it takes eight dollars of gas just to get to his summer job.
To hell with the poem, I need me some shekels, he sings,
misquoting both Ravikovitch and Snoop Dogg. Poetry was nowhere
in my father’s house, nor money neither, our doorposts marked, pass-over,
red rover; and yet in a pinch Dad could still recite Kipling’s “Gunga Din.”
Make fun if you must, my mother says, but look in the mirror
and I’m here to tell you that your father was a better man
than all those anti-Semitic Pounds and Eliots rolled up into one.

IV

That was twenty-three years ago, before my mother, cradling his neck
and not yet crying, waited, while outside in East New York
the ambulance raced and the Angel of Death loitered. Are you comfortable?
she asks, adjusting my father’s pillow, while he, ever the emcee,
his shoulders shrugging, mimicked Henny Youngman’s I make a living.
Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden would have repeated, were he there,
and what wouldn’t I give, at this moment, for his stiff British upper lip.
What’s one more death in the family, Otto Frank might have argued,
expunging not grief but sex from his daughter’s diary,
and what father, I wonder, would dare today to play jury or judge?

V

Are you writing another Holocaust poem, the Angel of Consciousness
who sits, while I muse, on my right shoulder, and whom I sometimes still
confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks?
I’m thinking now of my own children, remembering my home office,
the Akeidah etching above the desk, that angel, what’s her name,
holding Abraham’s straining arm, the knife blade pointing downward.
And when my son was born, I, exiled to the basement, books re-shelved,
forgot that picture which hung, my wide-eyed boy staring, ten months
above the crib. I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter says,
rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing only occasionally for applause.

VI

Burn everything after I’m dead, Kafka says, poking his pre-war Jewish head
into yet one more of my poems. He’s trying to explain the fatherland
to the fatherless. No one reads poetry anymore, anyway,
my mother, quoting from her own unpublished diary, writes.
And who doesn’t want to go on living even after death? my daughter recites.
I’m at my desk, buried again in this moldy basement, begging for quiet,
while upstairs, I can hear my great uncles Abbott and Costello arguing,
and now they’re chasing each other around the kitchen like two Keystone Cops,
and now they’re singing each other’s praises like Eliot and Pound, and now
they’re comforting each other like the Angels of Death and Forgetfulness.

VII

Quiet, I call out, castigating the offenders brought back buddy-style,
heads bowed and hand-in-hand, two pretty pre-teens caught hiding
behind stacks of spectacles, confiscated suitcases, and desecrated scrolls.
I want to face them towards this tearful Tower of Faces and teach them
proper museum protocol. But they are still unapologetic, giggling
and trading one-liners, these entertaining angels in training. I’d planned
to quote Kafka or even Kipling, but it’s clear I’ve lost control and suddenly
I can’t recall a single thing I came here to say. I am simply a young girl
badly in need of some rollicking fun, Anne whispers as I open the door
for a little air, letting her play, at least for today, out in the sun.

Sudden Death

I

I am looking for the letter that arrived after Uncle Sol’s death.
The one that says: The war is over! Love to Kayla, X-O-X.
I even searched back through the cardboard box,
opening each envelope in precise reverse order—
sorry for the lapse between this missive and the last—
watching their lives drawing closer once more,
hearing the rail cars heading back home;
hitched again in the South Brooklyn Yard.

II

I was twelve when my grandfather visited the Temple Mount.
My whole life and he’d never once left the neighborhood;
But here he is boarding a doublewide body.
That’s him, dour among the smiling tourists.
I can’t imagine who snapped this photo
or how it made its way back to Brooklyn,
but I’ve kept the envelope, Israeli stamped,
mailed twenty-two hours after his death.
And here’s Moses, posing on Mount Nebo,
looking forward toward the Promised Land.
Sure, it’s blurry, I say. He’s shaking like my grandfather;
davening the way all old men do at the edge of their dreams.

III

Everything these days is clear and instantaneous, my son insists.
I can’t tell if he’s making a moral judgment, or just snapping
at random. All I know is I want to interest him in Sol’s letters
and he won’t look my way. It’s Grandma Kay’s brother, I yell.
He was eighteen, your age, and married. You carry his name.
I want to circle Germany on a map, make some point about life
and its preciousness, how every moment might be our last.
But I settle, instead, beside him on the couch, and turn up the TV.

IV

We’re watching the quarterfinals of the World Cup.
It’s South Korea versus Spain. It’s sudden death.
The crowd is going crazy. Me? I don’t know a soul
in South Korea. I’ve never even been to Spain,
though these days Spanish is spoken everywhere
in Brooklyn. Nobody still knows Yiddish.

Dickel’s? Sol would ask, if he dropped by.
Today he’d be seventy eight. No big deal. Moses
lived until one hundred and twenty. Me? I was born
three weeks before the end of the Korean War.
Dickel’s Pickles, Sol says. Hot pastrami on rye!

It’s Hong Myung-Bo who converts the final kick.
He’s a national hero. Look how handsome, my mother says,
handing me a photograph of my father as a boy.
Bo won’t hear until tomorrow about the dead widow,
but her son is already grieving. He heard her shout We won
just before she collapsed. He called it a shriek of joy.

V

How did kids used to meet up after the game, my son asks?
I can’t remember, I answer, but it’s beside the point.
I couldn’t even tell you, anymore, why I’m always so angry:
Today, for instance, at the graduation, I watched him
text-message his girlfriend from across the aisle.

Me? I can’t catch anyone’s eye. Look this way, I yell, waving,
my arm outstretched like I’m signaling from shore as the plane
passes overhead, my voice drowned out by its fading engine,
my eyes blinded, by a sudden flash of light.
Say Nagasaki, I say. C’mon. Smile.

VI

Forget the VCR. I can’t even program my answering machine.
What are you, my son asks, some sort of Philistine?

Leave your message after the beep.
If it’s important, they’ll call again, I say. I’m going to sleep.

Repeat your name and please speak clearly.
Regards to Kayla. The war is over. I love you dearly.

Sorry you missed me. Try my cell.
I’m at Nebo’s. I’m at Dickel’s. I’m at David’s Citadel.

I just stepped out. I’ll be back in an hour.
Turn on the TV. It’s me. Holy shit. South tower.

You know what to do, so don’t be shy.
Pick up. It’s Dad. Gunshot. I....

VII

I watch, as outside my window my son head-fakes the rhododendron
and dribbles past the bougainvillea, running circles around the swing-set
he hasn’t used for eight summers, and now my heart stops as he feints
left, scoops, and follows the ball up the seesaw, balanced momentarily
on the rotted wooden fulcrum. I’m not telling you anything
you don’t already know, or won’t come to know in your own time. Sol
was on his way home, his teenaged wife, my aunt, not yet remarried,
and my grandfather, younger than I am today, was what? Praying?
It will be days before the dispatch arrives. See here, my mother says,
isn’t he looking dapper in his new hat? Now she’s turned the page
to a photograph of my father I’ve never seen before. Is it possible?
I’ve been through this album, how many times? He’s lying on the pavement,
bleeding, dying. He’s trying to speak. What? I lean in close. One moment,
I beg, but my son’s tapping on the glass, impatient, all attitude, challenging me,
one-on-one; he, blindfolded, or running backwards, winner take all.
Sudden death, he mouths. And suddenly I see that his face,
pressed against the lower right-hand corner of the pane, is a stamp
on an upside-down un-addressed envelope. And I don’t know where
he is going or when he will arrive or who will be looking for him
at the other end, or even the contents of the letter inside. He’s not talking,
not to me, at least, but his body is so full of words, it can barely contain
its victories and defeats, and all of the sounds that it still needs to say.

Visit Richard Michelson as Image Artist of the Month for March 2009.

Issue #60 • Winter 2008-2009