478 Identity poems

I have become the smaller flag on a ship, the shorter rafters of a roof, a knave in a pack of cards. I wear a skimpy coat, tall leather boot, and leather drinking flask. I am captured in a child's game and hit when grown men gamble. I am what they call a tame ape. I was a common man whose job was to lift weight. Mechanical devices that replaced my muscles took my job and pay and more—they took my human name. And I, who used to pull my master's boots, hoist meat and turn the spit, work the roller and the winch, climb the steeple, strike the bell and connect lines in telephone exchange, am a daw, the tiniest of crows, gathering loose sticks to nest in castle ruins. The solace of six centuries—and still— is once, on a high and windy hill, beside a well that was clear and full, I kissed a girl named Gylle.

Jack was quite nimble, Jack was quite quick, Jack gave the beanstalk A mighty big kick. Down came the giant— GIGANTIC fall— Bottoms up in a crater, Thus ending it all.

Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside. On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.

. . . you have inherited its burden without its mystery. —Elie Wiesel I.   March 1979 and I am watching Nazis march through Chicago. The bold type of the Sun-Times describes a small band of hoodlums, undereducated boy scouts, the better to be ignored. My grandfather, back hunched over his Bible, agrees. Jews like myself should stay home, should lay down our stones and pray like the Jews that we are. II.   Grandfather, you are easy to love with your long beard and the way you sway like a palm branch in the storm. It is easy to romanticize your spiritual search, worldly naiveté and wise rabbinical words. You belong in the books I read by Singer, Peretz, Sholom Aleichem. But their characters are ignorant of the chapters to come. You know where their prayers will lead. III.   A circle. Six Nazis. Your wife in the middle. One soldier says all Jewesses are whores and the others agree. You say nothing. Years later you'll decide to speak: "Do we not serve Hitler's purpose, we who would sooner renounce our beliefs than assume our burdens?" IV.   A generation after the Holocaust and I know no Hebrew. No Yiddish. No Torah. I fast only on the Day of Atonement and even then I've been known to cheat. A generation after the Holocaust and I apologize for my grandfather's bent back and wild gestures. I used to tremble to the rhythm of his prayers. I feared the mysterious words that kept us from the devil. Now, from my window I watch Nazis march. Their feet strike the pavement like the ticking of a clock. I am a Jew a generation after the Holocaust. Poorer, my grandfather says, without a past than he, who has no future.

An Etching A meadow brown; across the yonder edge A zigzag fence is ambling; here a wedge Of underbush has cleft its course in twain, Till where beyond it staggers up again; The long, grey rails stretch in a broken line Their ragged length of rough, split forest pine, And in their zigzag tottering have reeled In drunken efforts to enclose the field, Which carries on its breast, September born, A patch of rustling, yellow, Indian corn. Beyond its shrivelled tassels, perched upon The topmost rail, sits Joe, the settler’s son, A little semi-savage boy of nine. Now dozing in the warmth of Nature’s wine, His face the sun has tampered with, and wrought, By heated kisses, mischief, and has brought Some vagrant freckles, while from here and there A few wild locks of vagabond brown hair Escape the old straw hat the sun looks through, And blinks to meet his Irish eyes of blue. Barefooted, innocent of coat or vest, His grey checked shirt unbuttoned at his chest, Both hardy hands within their usual nest— His breeches pockets — so, he waits to rest His little fingers, somewhat tired and worn, That all day long were husking Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe of pioneer, the settler’s plough.

When John Henry was a little tiny baby Sitting on his mama's knee, He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel Saying, "Hammer's going to be the death of me, Lord, Lord, Hammer's going to be the death of me." John Henry was a man just six feet high, Nearly two feet and a half across his breast. He'd hammer with a nine-pound hammer all day And never get tired and want to rest, Lord, Lord, And never get tired and want to rest. John Henry went up on the mountain And he looked one eye straight up its side. The mountain was so tall and John Henry was so small, He laid down his hammer and he cried, "Lord, Lord," He laid down his hammer and he cried. John Henry said to his captain, "Captain, you go to town, Bring me back a TWELVE-pound hammer, please, And I'll beat that steam drill down, Lord, Lord, I'll beat that steam drill down." The captain said to John Henry, "I believe this mountain's sinking in." But John Henry said, "Captain, just you stand aside-- It's nothing but my hammer catching wind, Lord, Lord, It's nothing but my hammer catching wind." John Henry said to his shaker, "Shaker, boy, you better start to pray, 'Cause if my TWELVE-pound hammer miss that little piece of steel, Tomorrow'll be your burying day, Lord, Lord, Tomorrow'll be your burying day." John Henry said to his captain, "A man is nothing but a man, But before I let your steam drill beat me down, I'd die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord, I'd die with a hammer in my hand." The man that invented the steam drill, He figured he was mighty high and fine, But John Henry sunk the steel down fourteen feet While the steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord, The steam drill only made nine. John Henry hammered on the right-hand side. Steam drill kept driving on the left. John Henry beat that steam drill down. But he hammered his poor heart to death, Lord, Lord, He hammered his poor heart to death. Well, they carried John Henry down the tunnel And they laid his body in the sand. Now every woman riding on a C and O train Says, "There lies my steel-driving man, Lord, Lord, There lies my steel-driving man."

How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eye where he was sucker-punched and stagger out onto the Plaza blind. He had been waiting all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple topping over his ice cream and arguing either physics or philosophy. He thinks, at this late date, it was the cave again throwing a shadow, although it may have been only some way of reconciling the two oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow— if only there was a second moon. He had a kind of beard and though he could practically lift the front end of a car and was already reading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.

I am looking for a past I can rely on in order to look to death with equanimity. What was given me: my mother’s largeness to protect me, my father’s regularity in coming home from work at night, his opening the door silently and smiling, pleased to be back and the lights on in all the rooms through which I could run freely or sit at ease at table and do my homework undisturbed: love arranged as order directed at the next day. Going to bed was a journey.

Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I came, I, sometime living, sometime with a name, Creeping by iron ways across the bare Wastes of Wyoming, turning in despair, Changing and turning, till the fall of night, Then throbbing motionless with iron might. Four days and nights! Small stations by the way, Sunk far past midnight! Nothing one can say Names the compassion they stir in the heart. Obscure men shift and cry, and we depart. And I remembered with the early sun That foul-mouthed barber back in Pendleton, The sprawling streets, the icy station bench, The Round-up pennants, the latrinal stench. These towns are cold by day, the flesh of vice Raw and decisive, and the will precise; At night the turbulence of drink and mud, Blue glare of gas, the dances dripping blood, Fists thudding murder in the shadowy air, Exhausted whores, sunk to a changeless stare. Alive in empty fact alone, extreme, They make each fact a mortuary dream. Once when the train paused in an empty place, I met the unmoved landscape face to face; Smoothing abysses that no stream could slake, Deep in its black gulch crept the heavy Snake, The sound diffused, and so intently firm, It seemed the silence, having change nor term. Beyond the river, gray volcanic stone In rolling hills: the river moved alone. And when we started, charged with mass, and slow, We hung against it in an awful flow. Thus I proceeded until early night, And, when I read the station’s name aright, Descended—at the bidding of a word! I slept the night out where the thought occurred, Then rose to view the dwelling where I lay. Outside, the bare land stretching far away; The frame house, new, fortuitous, and bright, Pointing the presence of the morning light; A train’s far screaming, clean as shining steel Planing the distance for the gliding heel. Through shrinking frost, autumnal grass uncurled, In naked sunlight, on a naked world.

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling. But far up the mountain, behind the town, We too were swept out, out by the wind, Alone with the Tuscan grass. Wind had been blowing across the hills For days, and everything now was graying gold With dust, everything we saw, even Some small children scampering along a road, Twittering Italian to a small caged bird. We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood, And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face. I found the spider web there, whose hinges Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust, Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging And scattering shadows among shells and wings. And then she stepped into the center of air Slender and fastidious, the golden hair Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there, While ruins crumbled on every side of her. Free of the dust, as though a moment before She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself. I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped Away in her own good time. Many men Have searched all over Tuscany and never found What I found there, the heart of the light Itself shelled and leaved, balancing On filaments themselves falling. The secret Of this journey is to let the wind Blow its dust all over your body, To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly All the way through your ruins, and not to lose Any sleep over the dead, who surely Will bury their own, don’t worry.