506 History and politics poems

1 The children of the Czar Played with a bouncing ball In the May morning, in the Czar’s garden, Tossing it back and forth. It fell among the flowerbeds Or fled to the north gate. A daylight moon hung up In the Western sky, bald white. Like Papa’s face, said Sister, Hurling the white ball forth. 2 While I ate a baked potato Six thousand miles apart, In Brooklyn, in 1916, Aged two, irrational. When Franklin D. Roosevelt Was an Arrow Collar ad. O Nicholas! Alas! Alas! My grandfather coughed in your army, Hid in a wine-stinking barrel, For three days in Bucharest Then left for America To become a king himself. 3 I am my father’s father, You are your children’s guilt. In history’s pity and terror The child is Aeneas again; Troy is in the nursery, The rocking horse is on fire. Child labor! The child must carry His fathers on his back. But seeing that so much is past And that history has no ruth For the individual, Who drinks tea, who catches cold, Let anger be general: I hate an abstract thing. 4 Brother and sister bounced The bounding, unbroken ball, The shattering sun fell down Like swords upon their play, Moving eastward among the stars Toward February and October. But the Maywind brushed their cheeks Like a mother watching sleep, And if for a moment they fight Over the bouncing ball And sister pinches brother And brother kicks her shins, Well! The heart of man is known: It is a cactus bloom. 5 The ground on which the ball bounces Is another bouncing ball. The wheeling, whirling world Makes no will glad. Spinning in its spotlight darkness, It is too big for their hands. A pitiless, purposeless Thing, Arbitrary and unspent, Made for no play, for no children, But chasing only itself. The innocent are overtaken, They are not innocent. They are their father’s fathers, The past is inevitable. 6 Now, in another October Of this tragic star, I see my second year, I eat my baked potato. It is my buttered world, But, poked by my unlearned hand, It falls from the highchair down And I begin to howl. And I see the ball roll under The iron gate which is locked. Sister is screaming, brother is howling, The ball has evaded their will. Even a bouncing ball Is uncontrollable, And is under the garden wall. I am overtaken by terror Thinking of my father’s fathers, And of my own will.

How can we die when we're already prone to leaving the table mid-meal like Ancient Ones gone to breathe elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for a long time: when we skip dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind—Sorry we rushed off; the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set— use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.

In the morning of the tribe this name Ancapagari was given to these mountains. The name, then alive, spread into the world and never returned. Ancapagari: no foot-step ever spoken, no mule deer killed from its foothold, left for dead. Ancapagari opened the stones. Pine roots gripped peak rock with their claws. Water dug into the earth and vanished, boiling up again in another place. The water was bitten by aspen, generations of aspen shot their light colored trunks into space. Ancapagari. At that time, if the whisper was in your mouth, you were lighted. Now these people are buried. The root-taking, finished. Buried in everything, thousands taken root. The roots swell, nesting. Openings widen for the roots to surface. They sway within you in steady wind of your breath. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it. Ancapagari has circled, returned to these highlands. The yellow pines deathless, the sparrow hawks scull, the waters are going numb. Ancapagari longs to be spoken in each tongue. It is the name of the god who has come from among us.

Deer do not tremble, I know this. My bone and sinew twisted into fallow slenderness and the tibia twig thin. Four rods finished with a cloven hoof planted on rotting leaf mould: gloomy weight of the gold altar. The poet's words are wind-blown apples. Plucked lute strings vibrate to silence as I watch Caesar with my velvet eyes, long ears poised to absorb the rush of animal clamour that is hushed in the shells of human skulls. Despite the blood threat of power my doe body would not spring away — no flick of spotted fur into shadow.

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief and anger in the very place, whoever comes to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how the bookcase slides aside, then walks through shadow into sunlit room, can never help but break her secrecy again. Just listening is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats itself outside, as if all time worked round towards her fear, and made each stroke die down on guarded streets. Imagine it— four years of whispering, and loneliness, and plotting, day by day, the Allied line in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above the bed as pictures of her family; some actors; fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth. And those who stoop to see them find not only patience missing its reward, but one enduring wish for chances like my own: to leave as simply as I do, and walk at ease up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch a silent barge come clear of bridges settling their reflections in the blue canal.

Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored 
suede and leather  ... — Anne Frank, Tuesday, August 10, 1943 When Miep took us home with her She held us up in the air, Eye-level with those eyes You may know, eyes spelling Sorrow-girl, wait-for-me, Happiness-around-a-corner- One-day, hurry-back, don’t-tell. Two new hands took us in, Skin cradling skin. How empty we had been, Only a little bit worn — Not a penny, not a pebble Dwelling within. We became an altar, An offering red as wine, A wishing well. She was made to carry us Near and far, We were made to bear The pressure of her feet In darkness, in light, Their sweetness, their heat. We were getting used to her. Miep calls us a handsome pair.

Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, And the beneficent face of a nation Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom!

The Baltic Sea froze in 1307. Birds flew north From the Mediterranean in early January. There were meteor storms throughout Europe. On the first day of Lent Two children took their own lives: Their bodies Were sewn into goatskins And were dragged by the hangman’s horse The three miles down to the sea. They were given a simple grave in the sand. The following Sunday, Meister Eckhart Shouted that a secret word Had been spoken to him. He preached That Mary Magdalene Sought a dead man in the tomb But, in her confusion, found Only two angels laughing. . . This was a consequence of her purity And her all too human grief. The Baltic Sea Also froze in 1303— Nothing happened that was worthy of poetry.

I. I watch them line up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher passes, one pushes, and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in '42, I tell the behaved ones: orderly and under orders. And I'm about to begin that horrific story, the one they don't yet know, when I pause to open the door 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 From-This-You-Shouldn't-Know and May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred Horseradish and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich munched at Pesach 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'd 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 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, or money either, our doorposts marked pass-over; although in a pinch Dad could 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 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, mimics Henny Youngman's I make a living. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden might repeat, were he here, 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 argues, expunging not grief but sex from his daughter's diary, and what parent today would dare 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 often confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks. And now I'm recalling my home office, the Akeidah above the desk, the knife blade drawn downward, that Angel, what's her name, restraining Abraham's implausibly blood-stained arm. And because I, exiled to the basement when my Isaac arrived, overlooked that drawing, it hung ten months above my newborn son's head. I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter proclaims, rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing anxiously for applause. VI. Burn everything after I'm dead, Kafka said, poking his prewar 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?

Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl. Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows, to trail their fingertips in the water . . . All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees: red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her. Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae. Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor. Now under radar they study the green road glowing and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads. Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves, the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever. Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up and the Conqueror’s navy on its blue worsted waves and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up. Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” the white-and-liver-cows moo through the milky light. The human faces carved on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon as the sea can see the land and the land the sea the two of them will go to war.