IV. The Blink of An Eye
BABYLON
Another rounded heap of sun-dried brick
Distends the path our tired boots feebly kick,
Trekking all day across the level sand.
Distant and near they punctuate the land,
Tokens of human effort, all alike
They look from far, but close, each proves unique.
What mounds are these that brood on lives long gone?
Here lie the crumbling roots of Babylon.
O vanished ziggurat that struggled here,
Laboriously pitted tier by tier
Against the tyrant curve of gravity:
Your story haunts the stairs of history.
Upwards humanity’s huge steps still climb
Only to be upended over time.
Change forges branching futures from one past.
Nothing but everything can ever last.
What was it like to think only one word
Existed for each tool or stone or board?
That was the way our ancestors were sure
The world was made till they stopped killing poor
Strangers for babbling. How sweet their voices
Mingle across our aeons of blind choices
As cheerily they build your far-famed height,
Hanging your festive gardens in the light!
The symphony of joyous language fades
Across this rubbled land that peace evades.
Even our god has changed beyond all hope
Of raising any unity of faith. We grope
For words to name the speaker of the curse
That still confounds the fabric of this verse:
He came surrounded by his anxious peers
To cancel you, mother of all their fears.
Ikon of human hubris, have we found
Some answer to the fable you expound?
To worship the forever fecund dance
Of fields of waves, necessity and chance
That we have taught ourselves makes everything?
What? Make that lottery Creator, King,
And all the chaos that impairs our reach
Just Thompson’s Second Law at work on speech?
We don’t know where we’re going, but we care.
Is that all we can do to get us there?
Maybe it is, but I would like to know
Whether to speed it on or take it slow.
I’ve heard that God’s Word whispers in all things:
It dances in the waves . In birds it sings.
The words that left your boast unfinished rest
In every lexicon. We love them best.
They recollect how all this might have been
If we had listened to your mounting din.
Two voices wrestle in the human throat,
One the ego’s unruly, feckless note,
The other Reason that, in Chomsky’s view,
Remains what all languages translate to,
The art of being what we say, once given
To build a world fit to become our Heaven.
Behind our backs the sun, descending, takes
The ruddy hues of dust-laced air. It bakes
Your clay less callously. Your bits of ruin borrow
Fire from it. Shadows stretch toward tomorrow
In deepening violet. Someone stakes out our camp.
We break out rations, blankets and a lamp.
Above, the universe, forever changing,
Wipes out old certainties, new ones arranging.
—Lionel Willis
***
AUGENBLICK IS GERMAN FOR GLIMPSE
Too long a word to describe so brief a time,
perfect enough to mirror one perfect lie,
recently voted the fourth most beautiful word
in the German language, it means a moment
and spoken sounds like the blink of an eye.
How lovely the recentness of an instant seems
to them, the romance of the immediate,
the thrill of what’s almost gone before it arrives,
all this and more precisely incised
in a single word like heartworm in a muscle
when every beat might mean an ending
and all of existence merely a glimpse that vanishes
to that universal eye whose light has failed us.
The Germans love this word. What came before it?
—Michael Salcman
***
AN ASSESSMENT
Nature, you are no goddess, though despotic.
Your servants might expect to be betrayed.
You are an energy that pulses through
This ever-changing world that you have made.
You are neither good nor evil, cruel nor kind,
Of pity and of malice quite devoid,
Indifferent to all you have created,
To all that fossils show you have destroyed.
No goddess, yet you fill the role of siren
To lure folk from their world of city streets,
Of money and machines and competition.
Their communes meet a series of defeats.
No goddess, yet an idol to the many
Who see the milk but not the sabre tooth,
Who think your closeness purifies mankind.
History tells us this is not the truth.
—Henry Summerfield
***
DEATH OF MY ENEMY
Soul to soul we step, walking upon the dead
carpeting a great city—native Iroquois and Dutch
settlers, also high-divers clothed in flesh—
trample Spring’s blood-red blossoms and fetch
garlands on Gaga’s elevator shoes and rhinestone toes,
speak in volumes of forgettable prose,
and misremember untold numbers
of helmeted heroes, Nimrods asleep on our avenues
and homeless corners, their arms outstretched beg
for kindness, as spectral as burned flesh,
as familiar as a harbor sound,
as unforgiving as a rabid hound
chained in a neighbor’s yard. What can silence
their silent petitions, where is the poem of heaven?
Not here in the hallowed ground off Church Street
with its flattened temples nor that far-off house in Pakistan.
If truly dead, who is left to fear our prideful power
and is nothing good to come of this vengeful hour?
— Michael Salcman
***
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
The way I explained it to myself, the way
I made sense of it in my own way (I was seven
when I first learned about them), was all those people
starving and crying and dying together in those big
piles behind the barbed wire—were forced to concentrate
on suffering. So it made sense to call it that. That part
made sense, I thought, because concentration was very
difficult. And I hated having to do it myself
in elementary school when the teacher caught us
looking out the window at the trees, or the sky, or the rooftops
of the houses across the street—when she caught us looking
out at life—and forced us cruelly back to the problem
under our noses, the problem of the numbers, the problem
that wasn’t going away no matter how much we
looked away from it. And those people, I thought, they must have
tried to look away from it too. They must have groaned
and looked away, and there must have been sky
above them, and trees on the other side, and maybe even a red
rooftop or two off in the distance where life was going on
in rooms with clean white linen and tinkling forks and knives…
The way you make sense of a problem like that, a solution like that,
a number like that, a number that’s so big you can’t fit it
in your head, can’t fit it in the world—though the world keeps trying
that solution, over and over—is to break it down, like the teacher said,
and keep breaking it down until you get to the smallest parts,
the ones divisible only by themselves and one: sky, tree, house,
one little boy. Then look out the window at the world again,
and see if it looks any different.
—Paul Hostovsky
***
WHAT WE DID ON SUNDAYS DURING THE WAR
In the early forties, few people owned a car, and if you had one,
you hardly used it, because gas was rationed.
If you had one and could afford to, you went for a ride on Sundays.
Otherwise, you went for a walk.
Every Sunday, we went for a walk, my mother and father,
my sister and I. Over the bridge, past Starlight Park,
up the 174th Street hill, around the corner to visit cousin Benny,
my father’s nephew, on Benny’s father’s side.
Benny was a doctor, but we got to call him Benny. There was a
stoop, a waiting room for patients, Benny’s office, a kitchen.
We never got past the kitchen, but there must have been
bedrooms, a bathroom.
I hung out in the waiting room; it was piled with magazines
I never saw anywhere else, like Esquire. When it was a sick visit,
I was brought into the office and sat up on the exam table.
On Sundays, we came into the kitchen, drank coffee, ate strudel.
Benny’s mother, aunt and uncle lived there, somewhere in the
mystery of the rear. Benny’s aunt made the strudel.
I was told they were refugees. His Uncle Martin
had a wife and children he hoped to bring out after the war.
Martin, Benny’s uncle on his mother’s side, was a photographer.
He loved taking pictures of our family. He even took one
of my sister sitting on the exam table in Benny’s office. We’d
glue those pictures into our family album.
After the war ended, we’d still walk to Benny’s on Sundays.
His mother and his aunt and uncle sat in the kitchen, silent and
somber. His aunt no longer offered us coffee and strudel.
Uncle Martin stopped taking our pictures.
— Florence Weinberger
***
ALICE DEAD AT ONE HUNDRED TEN
—for Alice Herz-Sommer (1903-2014)
Her family knew Kafka and Mahler.
Of the former Alice remembered
he was a strange little man
who once came to Passover dinner.
Alice’s mother died in the camps, also
her lovely husband Sommer.
And his lovely name.
Also Kafka’s sisters and lovers.
She and her son Stepan were spared
by an officer who loved Chopin.
Hitler loved dogs and ate vegetarian.
Three times a year the Red Cross came
to certify the kindness of her keepers.
Three times a year the prisoners held
an opéra comique, mostly Mozart and Wagner.
Otherwise
no heat or food or clean water
in the Terezín lager. Without music
she would have starved like the others
or drowned frozen by grief.
But she knew every Chopin étude by heart
and ate them for optimism.
— Michael Salcman
***
THE MARTYRED VILLAGE
On June 10, 1944, a German SS detachment dynamited and burned the French
village of Oradur-sur-Glane, killing 642 men, women, and children. The ruins
are preserved as a memorial.
Blackened baby prams slough ash.
Houses gape, roofless
as Picasso’s Charnal House. A dead child’s
rag doll lies beneath a gutted crib.
We walk the village streets.
No one smiles. No one speaks.
Gone, the rhythm of the farrier’s pin
to shoe a horse’s hooves.
Gone, the whir of the cobbler’s Landis
stitcher, the smells of glue and pitch.
Gone, the hum of the Singer,
fingers guiding blue and white gingham
under the needle. Rust coats the treadle.
— Edythe Haendel-Schwartz
***
REPORT FROM THE BOOK OF VISIONS
I survived the hunger
I put nothing into my mouth
until bodily secretions stopped
and became a rumor among my body’s cavities.
I exercised at night, I broke vessels,
I made teraphin for myself, I took myself
outside, I revealed myself with great lights.
At the propitious hour I beheaded my desire
I grasped it with my hand (there was neither fire nor water
in it), I laughed expressionlessly at its misfortune.
What could I do when I was dragged in chains
through the courtyards on the eve of a foreign holiday
and I bored my ear through at the gate of the city,
the crowd pointed at my face. I could not
remain alive.
— Amichai Chasson
translated from the Hebrew by Esther Cameron
***
THE GRAVEDIGGERS
”We scooped the darkness empty”
— Paul Celan
The corpses of stars turn into melted candle wax in the neighborhoods behind
our walls
We watch them wasting away every nine months
They are created anew in big clay vats
They block the streets beside our house.
Every morning we overturn the tables of the moneychangers
We sew curtains from last night’s wedding dresses.
We hide summers in pits of the earth.
Every morning we wait for darkness.
We remain outside the walls exposed
to winds, to plunder, exposed to every gypsy
who relieves himself in our yards
No one stands guard
and when we return from the workshops to break
the bread, to drink the milk,
to sprinkle salt on the cork table,
the stars do away with themselves
and their tired flesh sours into boiling milk
upon our lives.
Our dead we’ll bury under the floors
of our houses in the dark
—Amichai Chasson
tr. Esther Cameron
***
[untitled]
Let the hardworking keep their accomplishments
Let the courageous keep their deeds of valor
Look, we have found a slug,
Said the children I found in among the mallow plants
Looking for wet brown snails,
And I thought to myself, it’s lucky that memories
Of acts done to snails and slugs do not occur to them
Acts done to boys and girls
Acts of children only
Let the heavy-laden keep all the diligence
Let the generals keep the no-outcry-in-the-streets
I will keep the lefthand corner at the peak of my head
And pack into it a mix of love and faith in the ability to —
—Tirtsa Posklinsky-Shehori
tr. Esther Cameron
***
REQUIEM FOR A FLOATING VOICE
Beit Zayit, 7/4/19, 12 Nissan, two days before the elections
I am a floating voice,
floating — on the river’s surface
like a dry leaf,
a voice floating in a river of refuse,
swept along by a wind from the polls,
a wafting of lies.
I am a voice floating fleeing
activist pitchforks seeking to punch their letters
into me that my form may be as theirs,
letters seeking to wipe out their fellow-letters.
A Torah cannot be written with one letter,
not even with two.
A floating voice, soon to sink.
And my voice that crowns kings,
that seals fates,
that stamps decrees,
is moving with accelerating speed
toward the voice of the thundering waterfall.
—Imri Perel
tr. Esther Cameron
[Translator’s note: in Israel voting is done by putting into a ballot box
slips marked with the sign of one of the parties. These signs consist of one
or two letters of the alphabet.]
***
OF COLD CODE WRITTEN IN THE STARS….*
Yes, let’s go beyond ourselves,
our usual communication. Find
new patterns, different patterns
than what machines now hold us to:
screens where blown kisses from loved ones’ lips
don’t take shape until seconds after.
Let’s look at night when we know light
is a billion numbers away.
From it we can spin our stories,
the real ones that matter and last,
taking time beyond fractured moments
to a slower future, a deeper past.
— Katharyn Howd Machan
*a last line by Barbara Crooker in Some Glad Morning