The Haunting of Memory and History

Hard Damage by Aria Aber

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Paperback, 126 pp., $17.95

The collage of memories that make up Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Winner, offers an opportunity to reckon with the undeniable fact that poetry offers a home for the past and an understanding of our relationship to history. Memory is integral to why poetry must exist. American poet Ira Sadoff tells us that “memory is required for poetry,” and what Aber does is showcase this truth along with the complexity of memory, while questioning whether “memory is a privilege.”

Hard Damage chronicles Aber’s understanding of the trauma ingrained within her familial lineage stemming from violence and suffering the family experienced in Afghanistan, as she grapples with the wounds inflicted by the political and personal remnants of history. In the poem “Family Portrait,” we get a glimpse of the microcosm of the family and how the uncovering of memory is ingrained within the familial unit. Aber writes:

Family, to me,

Is only the sweat of female secrecy

This discussion of family provides more nuance as we learn about the speaker’s mother’s political imprisonment in poems such as “Asylum” and “Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?” The aperture widens as the poems convey the inescapable reality of just how much the political is immersed in the personal or the generational:

. . . How much

of my yearly tax is spent to bomb

the dirt that birthed me?. . .

Aber challenges us to investigate a painful and violent history that begets a continued destructive present, and how these events shape the wounds that are passed down again and again through the generations. Hard Damage asks, with urgency, how living through—and with— trauma, violence, and war engages our understanding of the self, lineage, and survival. How does one live with the enveloping experience of violence? How does one access ancestral history and language? How can all of this be reclaimed?

By starting her collecting within the realm of the personal, Aber prepares us to journey into a series of enveloping worlds or sections of poetry interrogating the questions of access, history, language, and reclamation. Each world presents not only the opportunity to grapple with language but also to grapple with the reality of war. In the series of poems starting with “Rilke and I,” each poem elevates the conventions of the prose poem to discuss how we remember what has happened to us. Aber writes:

My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women’s Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me …

Within the poetic experience, the speaker is working to reconcile intergenerational trauma and the reality of being born after the original trauma occurred. How are we meant to grasp these memories? How do we accept that we are removed from specific traumas as individuals but are very much intertwined with the remnants of our family’s pain? Each of the worlds explored in Hard Damage offers a different understanding of the haunting nature of memory, of political violence, and the attempt to move forward. Aber’s chronicles of the historic realities of her mother’s political imprisonment, coupled with her awareness of her own privilege, creates a tapestry of the different ways that memories are consume us.

Aber’s voice is entirely her own within this collection, and yet it’s made possible by her intentions of honoring the resilience and death of her ancestors. Not only is Hard Damage a conversation with history, but it also presents a rich voice conversing with various aspects of history. From speaking to the German poet Rilke, using the etymology of German, English, and Arabic words and those of the speaker’s own family, Aber’s collection explores what we are left with when investigating the roots of our world today.

The profound attention Aber pays on the line-level to the crafting of her poems presents many opportunities to engage in the depth of moments recalled by the speaker and the intensity these moments have for the personal and the collective. In “Nostos,” the speaker notes:

In English the body is both dead

And alive, but I know the blight of grief

Has a heart and thus will love, and learn, and thusly

Learn to hate—

Ira Sadoff, in “Poetic Memory, Poetic Design,” does not simply claim that memory is needed for poetry. He asserts that “syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues line to line,” is needed for poetic expression. Alberto Ríos tells us that “lines are what distinguish poetry from all other art forms, and therefore they intrinsically mean something. They help us to see what makes a poem a poem.” Aber not only expresses a deep sense of care and attention on the line level but also a commitment in keeping the integrity of what a line must do in a poem.

On the line level, the poems in Hard Damage break and disrupt our own understanding In the poem, “At the Hospital, My Language,” for instance, Aber writes:

cousin with no empathy. But family

is family; the awkward shell

I harbor, crack—avian eyelids,

hospital, yolk—

These lines are not only enjambed, but media caesura allows for a break and redefinition of the language before them. Because of Aber’s syntactical construction, our understanding of family is reconstructed. It takes on multiple meanings. In Aber’s crafting of the line, she evokes multiple interpretations and provides a deepening of our understanding of the line itself and the poem as a whole. These moments of intentional meaning on the line level contribute to what I find most compelling about Aber’s collection. Hard Damage works to bridge the micro space of the line to the macro understanding of what makes poetry so altering to the reader. It is in the singular moments of surprise, redefinition, and nuance created within the line that lead us to unearth meaning.

This unearthing reveals the personal and political history that sits at the crux of the collection. Aber’s yearning to show the intricacies of the Afghanistan–US relationship, the Afghanistan–German relationship, and her own understanding of the traumas these political relationships have caused creates a collection intense in its ability to interrogate the political structures, while providing a deep sense of what it feels for a person to grieve the aftermath of violence, war, and imprisonment.

It is nearly impossible to not feel the haunting density of the memories Aber explores as we immerse ourselves further into the collection. The poems ask us to be consumed by the intricate experiences of the speaker, while also carrying the responsibility and gravity of the reality Aber exposes. An entire history cannot possibly be conveyed in a mere hundred pages, yet what Aber recounts is done with striking clarity and an acute awareness of the privilege writers have to tell a story. She says:

It is a terrible time

To be alive.

I say this with the privilege

Of being alive

We are born in the midst of past and ongoing violence. What does that mean as we reconcile our identities with the trauma rooted in our ancestry? What does it mean to be generations removed, and yet still contending with the inherited trauma of our ancestors? This collection reminds us of that undertaking. It urges us to wonder, reflect, and determine how to deal with the damage.

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Interview: Jim Ray Daniels

Jim Raymond Daniels was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. His literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series, and he has won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University. Daniels also collaborates with director John Rice to create films of merged media. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or scriptwriter for forty-four books and films.

The following interview took place with Jim Ray Daniels on November 18, 2017, at the Miami Book Fair. Since that time, he has published an additional collection of poetry, The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and a collection of stories, The Perp Walk (Michigan State University Press, 2019), as well as co-editing Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2019). While this interview focuses on Rowing Inland, we hope it will illuminate Daniels’s prolific output and poetic sensibility more generally.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

Before we talk about your collection Rowing Inland I want to get you to speak a moment on imagery. I watched the trailer for one of your films, The End Of Blessings, based on your poem of the same name.

The camera follows an African American cyclist on his weekly Sunday ride, when he regularly passes an older Italian couple sitting on their porch after church. There’s no dialogue. You concentrate on imagery, sounds, and the breathing, and you’re taking the art of poetry and putting it into film. This may sound naïve, but I was blasted by the film. I mean, we don’t expect to see these kinds of crossovers of art forms.

Jim Ray Daniels:

We know when we make these short films that we can’t expect to make any money off them. There’s been other films made of poems, and typically you’ll see the text on the screen, or the voice-over, and we were like, yeah, we’re not going do to either of those things. We want to make a work of art and do something interesting and different with the medium of film, and so we focus in on sound and imagery, which are also huge parts of poetry writing. In that way, we hope we can get across the essence of the poem.

TFR:

I love that, because when you’re introducing someone to poetry, they can feel quite intimidated They may be too concerned they might not understand poetry. In my intro to poetry classes, I show students pictures of cave paintings to stress the importance of imagery and the ancient tie we have to images. When I watched the video this morning I thought, wow, I want to use it in the classroom.

Daniels:

I’ll give you the link to the full film.

TFR:

Thank you! A film like this will help the student move away from words and worrying about the words’ meanings, to a place where they see the images and hear the rhythms, and we don’t mean perfect end-rhymes. It might spark them to pay attention to sound as they move about their world. So, tell, me, where did this idea came from? I read that you are an avid cyclist—

Daniels:

That’s correct.

TFR:

What sparked you to do this? To move from the poem to the film?

Daniels:

As a writer I try and find what’s going on beneath the surface—and in Rowing Inland, I think you see a lot of it, too, where on the surface it doesn’t seem as if you see a lot of things, or like nothing interesting is happening. So, a guy riding up a hill on his bicycle—on the surface you don’t think there’s anything going on, but there really is a lot layered in there. And, I try to write a lot about my own experiences and enthusiasms. The director—he’s my partner in these films, his name is John Rice, he’s great, he’s also a big cyclist, and he said, “Have you ever written anything about cycling? Maybe we should make a movie about cycling.” And I said, “I got this poem, ‘The End of Blessings,’” and he said, “We can do this!” It’s a short film, and it and the poem each are in three parts: You rise up the hill, the old couple’s there, you rise up the hill, the old couple is not there, he rides up the hill, and the woman is there by herself.

I gave away the ending (laughs).

TFR:

I think it’s a wonderful medium to get people to see poetry as they walk down their street, go to the local store, to see images and hear rhythm all around. Anything to get people to appreciate poetry, but I don’t have to tell you that.

Daniels:

(Laughing) No, no.

TFR:

Rowing Inland is packed with imagery, imagery of Detroit in particular, and memories of adolescence, and parents and the grandfather, the yard, and mowing grass, there’s just so much here. When you’re writing, are you back there in your mind, where you are this past self again?

Daniels:

I get transported back to those places. And it’s really exciting as a writer—as a writer yourself I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—where suddenly the process of writing does take you back. One of things poetry does is preserves moments in time, like photographs, an emotional kind of photograph, and I like to keep track of things and go back and move forward and revisit things I’ve written about before and see them differently through the lens of the present. I guess I’ve always written a lot about Detroit, and first there was some concern I was repeating myself, but—I feel like I always bring this up, it’s my mantra—novelist Richard Price said that where you’re from is “like the zip code for your heart.” I just remind myself that no matter where I go that’s in me, that place is in me and those people are in me, and they help shape who I am today. There’s the mother lode of experiences when you’re growing up and adolescence too, though not the whole book is about that.

The other thing for me, with that book, is people say, where are you from?, and I say, well I’m, from Detroit, because it’s easy to say, and, yeah, I was born in Detroit. But we moved to Warren, Michigan, right outside Detroit when I was a young boy. And so here, in this book, I deal more with Warren, which is the city bordering Detroit, where I went to high school. People from Detroit know that Warren and Detroit are two very different places. And, it has to do with coming back to James Baldwin in a way, with race. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex, he has some scenes of the riots in Detroit in 1967 and he once said, “Detroit is always about race.” And I wanted to make that distinction, so the long section in the center is a series of poems that are connected called “Welcome to Warren.” I wanted to capture this place people would just drive through, because it’s so anonymous-seeming. It’s basically houses surrounded by car factories. I wanted to try to bring that place to life—even if all the houses on the street look the same, the people are all different.

TFR:

Often there’s a way you might enter a certain collection, maybe from an emotional place or a geographical place, some kind of familiarity, some commonalities, and there was so much for me to discover in this book that was familiar to me. I’m from Chicago. Chicago, Detroit—you and I grew up within a few years of each other, in the land and culture of the steel mill towns, so when I read this, I kept going “yes” and I’ve already marked, noted, and highlighted the heck out of it,

As I read, I was conscious of how you were returning “home” as poet, and I thought about how I return to Chicago in my writing, though I haven’t lived there in decades. It’s my haunt, my muse. So I’m reading about the Detroit area, I’ve been to Detroit several times, I have relatives close by, and I kept feeling how much this is a familiar place, yet it is so much more than just one place.

Daniels:

It’s funny you mention Chicago, because Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck was a huge influence on me as a writer. So Chicago was his town, and he really brought it to life in his poems and stories, he writes both, and was a influence on me as a young writer.

That’s the key to writing about place so that others beyond that place can appreciate it, and that’s where the imagery comes in. Even though somebody may not be interested in going in an auto factory, you’re going to pull them in and say, Hey! look around, There’s poetry here.

TFR:

There is, and you’ve sparked me, inspired me with images of empty factories, the steel factories, which might sound strange. Also, there were so many poems in your collection that talked about the basement, and most of us who grew up “up north” had basements—down here in Florida, we don’t have basements, but there are so many poems in Rowing Inland that refer to the basement—

Daniels:

I never thought about that! But, yeah, (laughing) the basement’s big!

TFR:

In my life, the basement was a place, is a place, that holds a lot of memories. I was so touched by these particular poems, and I think that you as poet sometimes don’t know how your work, your words, might reach a reader until the book’s been out a while and you start to hear from readers.

In writing about the basement, you also wrote “upstairs she kept the order”—speaking about your mother— and then, “Downstairs, he drove another nail in.” You bring us into this neighborhood, this home, so that much of Rowing Inland is clearly set not in the heart of the city, but in a suburb, that commonality of so many Americans. At least, that’s where the first section is; the book is organized into four sections—

You have a line in here, where you’re an adolescent where you don’t quite understand what’s going on in the adult world, and in the “eight mile,” where you have physical landscape a little removed from the city—and as a poet, you make the connections and, then it reaches me, who grew up in a different city. Do the connections surprise you? Or do you feel they’ve always been there and just sort of bubble up a little bit?

Daniels:

I like when the connections surprise me. Your subconscious mind keeps going back to things without your realizing it.

And it’s true that adolescence is a time, especially in the suburbs, where we often didn’t fully understand what was going on. Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and Warren where the rapper Eminem is from. He did a film called 8 Mile, because he’s from that area, and there’s this whole border mentality, and that’s why he called the movie 8 Mile, and it’s like ten lanes wide and in the Detroit area. This kind of border mentality has kind of a symbolic resonance. It was interesting growing up there as a kid—you didn’t quite understand what was going on, such as with the riots in 1967.

TFR:

I want to ask about a poem that haunted me, the one about the young woman who died, in the fire?

Daniels:

Marlene, in “Calling out Marlene Miller.”

TFR:

You were in Warren then.

Daniels:

Yes. She haunts me. Basically, your first death growing up—one that’s not like a grandparent. It is huge. Your first love is huge, but especially when your first love is also your first death.

TFR:

And having to put those two together—they don’t leave you. You’ve written about her before.

Daniels:

It keeps on, I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about her at various points.

TFR:

Some of us have one muse, some several, but we keep returning to them. I tell students to return to them. They’re bittersweet, those sorrows. Marlene Miller comes back again, in this book.

Daniels:

I think there’s three poems in here about her.

TFR:

I was surprised that she continues, yet there was a sense of satisfaction that she does. I start to feel like I know Marlene or I knew Marlene. There were Marlene’s in my life, and I believe many of us have such figures who haunt us.

Would you read a poem for me? “Weeding Out the Week”? Loved it. Took me back to the little brick row houses just south of Chicago, of Riverdale, where I grew up. The weeds, the brick, the rough brick.

Daniels:

Yes, sure, and it’s about trying to find your hiding places (laughs).

TFR:

Yes! Can young people even have hiding places anymore?

Daniels:

That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but in our current culture I think it’s harder. Behind the garage, between houses, little places where things were peaceful, and you could sort them out on your own. without the whole world watching

TFR:

To turn to your personal voice, there’s a poem where you were coming into a sort of self-realization. You say, “I only faintly began to realize life is mostly a series of rhetorical questions.” We all go through these self-discoveries, don’t we?

Daniels:

Yes, yes. These are things that happen: self-discoveries are necessary.

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Three Months Without Razor

or the scratch

calling from behind

without kiss of water to skin

without the graze of a finger

or palm to cradle a smile

but love—at times—

like winter

ends abruptly

and with a blade

the pores shocked

and opening

their wide mouths

once again—

without arrest—

dancing with the sun

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Blue

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Earth’s Weight

He knows we uproot burdock

and hack down the musky trees of heaven.

He knows we kill mosquitoes,

but spare the killer spiders. He knows

how cats and opossums look

when they get run over: slick loops

of veined intestines, bulged eyes

and choked-out tongues. He knows

the living die, but do not want to die:

worm tugged thin from dirt to bird;

hooked fish muscling for the water;

scared pig scuffing against the ramp.

He knows we humans die, and kill

our own. He knows what soldiers are,

what warplanes do. He is four

and he also knows numbers:

a hundred and twenty-five pounds,

his mother. Sixty minutes, one long hour.

Three million people, the city of Chicago.

He’s four, and lately wants to know wars:

“Tell me a war, Daddy.” I name one,

and he wants the number of people killed.

The Civil War: six hundred thousand.

“Is that more than a thousand?

Can you count that many? Tell me

another war.” And another. He pays

attention. Vietnam: more than two million.

World War Two: at least forty million.

“That’s a lot, isn’t it?” Later he’ll ask, “Why?”

and we’ll talk about money, land, hate,

and following orders, but right now

all he wants is the name of a war

and the numbers of the killed—numbers

so vast you couldn’t count them

in a single lifetime, like the number

to tally earth’s weight—a number he loves

to tell and tell: six point six sextillion tons.

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birth of venus

tidal women splay tempera

the conch pigmented against turquoise waters

her body sea-bound in paint and bone

she wears herself in brush strokes

zephyr and aura blow embryonic seawater from her shoulders

spring’s hora rushes to mantle her newborn curves

renaissanced she crashes borders architected

as venetian lips she cannot speak through

her body imaginative

almost cadaverous

she speaks around

she gazes as she is gazed upon

her nakedness to nudity

now pornographic

now classical

her body tidal

father her your words

your chipped teeth

your plaster-rotted frescoes

in your marbled mausoleums

she speaks you back

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A Breakup Letter to Opium

This video contains difficult subject matter which may not be suitable for children.

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Cartilage

One night, when I was in grade school, my parents hosted a party. Other families came, co-workers. There were drinks. A man in a yellow tie had a margarita and then another and another. He said his ex-wife was a tramp. He stumbled as he passed from the living room into the den, where we kids were playing, entered the room looking unsure of why he walked into it.

“A bitch,” he said. “Total bitch.”

That night, I swore to my mom I’d never drink. She laughed, asked me why. I said I hated that man, that there was no need to drink, that I was happy without it. I was seven or maybe eight. She said I’d understand when I was older. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, knowing I’d prove my mom wrong.

The first time I got drunk was at Vlad’s, the summer after my freshman year of high school. We bought a handle of vodka so cheap, we thought, that the homeless man we’d given a twenty to buy it had given us seventeen dollars change. We passed the bottle with a shot glass and a chaser of store-brand cola. Around my fourth shot, everything started spinning. It felt good, wholesome, the ritual. Later, trying to sleep on Vlad’s floor, head resting on my bunched-up hoodie, I thought about what I swore to my mom, her laughter, and I felt an unmooring. Who knew what I’d believe in ten years? Twenty? Who would I be?

I was friends with Vlad because he and I rode the city bus together after school. By that point, my mom and dad had divorced, and on days at my dad’s house I’d ride one bus out from the suburbs into the core of downtown Seattle, where I’d walk up Stewart to wait by a garbage can on the backside of the convention center for the number 18, which then took me to school, just a stone’s throw from my mom’s. Vlad and I took advantage of our afternoons downtown, hitting the market for donuts or piroshkies or hum bao, drinking dollar tallboys of Arizona Iced Tea from minimarts where homeless people moved around in parallel to our thin reality, buying hot dogs or imitation crab sold on Styrofoam trays wrapped in cellophane.

Vlad had a knack for finding free food. At GameWorks we strolled the arcade, swiping a chicken leg off an abandoned plate, a slice of pizza at the bar. In the shampoo-scented hallways of downtown hotels, we found room service carts with scraps of porterhouse and baked potato, or the browned edges of a salmon frittata, the last bits of flesh out of the carcass of a Dungeness crab. We’d walk to the ballpark and talk down a scalper, or head up to the Starbucks on the forty-fourth floor of the Columbia Center to take in the view. Eventually, we’d split. I’d catch the 511 out way north, the ride quiet, still with the sodden air of evening commuters.

Vlad dropped out before the end of the school year. It made me wish I could drive. I’d sit alone in the back of the number 18, my biology textbook open on my lap, my gaze elsewhere, following the sequence of teriyaki joints and coffee shops, rain puddling at the curb.

My senior year, I saw Vlad in the parking lot at Leilani Lanes. I heard he’d been stealing cars. I’d tried to avoid him, but he caught up to me, put his hand on my shoulder. He asked if I wanted to buy some greeting cards and produced from under his jacket a small binder of samples. He told me I could make a good buck in the greeting-card game and invited me over to see how it was done.

His house, his parents’ house, smelled like chicken and mildew. None of his family was home but his friend was there, a guy with a gentle, fragile smile that made me anxious. He was seated in the parlor, where they’d spread a table with patterned cardstock, scissors, bottles of glue. Vlad asked if I was hungry and retrieved a roast chicken from the fridge, submerged in its own congealed juice. We ate it cold, with our hands, our fingers glistening.

We smoked a joint in the woods. His friend talked about how it easy it was to crib a Toyota. I got the sense he was trying to impress me. Vlad asked if I wanted to steal a car with them.

“Nah,” I said, and wondered why I hadn’t just said no.

We wandered the neighborhood in the wash of streetlight, going nowhere in particular. I kept smelling my hand, thinking about if my mom would smell the weed.

When I’d come home the morning after getting drunk for the first time, I’d been worried she would smell alcohol on my breath. I could feel booze in my mouth and lungs, in my pores, in my sweat. I stood in the entryway telling her we mostly played Xbox.

“Are you okay?” she said. I felt like I’d been emptied out and then filled with vapor. But from her tone and expression I knew that she knew what I’d done and also that she didn’t mind. It was like I’d crashed through some invisible barrier from one reality into another more like hers. She had known my whole life this feeling that felt so new, this hollowness and also the night’s strange spinning joy.

My hand didn’t smell like weed, but it did smell like chicken cartilage. Those days I thought a lot about the smell of food because I was working part-time washing dishes at a burger joint. I was terrible at it. Each day I’d come home soaked, my shirt thick with grease, ketchup, tartar.

“You going to college?” Vlad asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where?” his friend said.

“California,” I said. “Got a scholarship.”

Vlad said, “What are you gonna study?”

I’d been telling people business with a minor in art history but that was a lie. My mom had a fantasy of my future where I ran a restaurant and painted on the side, but all I knew was the certainty of a looming void stretching out before me. I still felt like a child, no direction, no idea what was next. And here was Vlad. Whatever next was, he was already living it.

We turned a corner and another, began to run out of small talk. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw Vlad, but I didn’t not know it either. There was a damp gust, and I zipped my baggy raincoat shut. It was cold but not too cold, wet but not really raining.

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Starlight

I bring the watered-down wine to my mother’s lips

hold the plastic cup at an angle, tilt the straw.

Pleasures remain, and we practice them.

The body in water.

The anticipation of spring.

Hummingbirds.

Above the deck, a string of lights levitates

below the sunshade like a globed consciousness

working only in the night.

Below the deck—small animals,

bundles of rustling nerves.

How many worlds?

How many dimensions hiding

in our perceived walls? In the dark of summer

we watch insects give themselves to fire

and we take in my father’s stories with more wine,

more water. When it is time, we will rise together

on the homemade lift into the living

room. We will wheel down the hall and

my brother will cradle the arc of my mother

in his arms and lay her to sleep in bed.

This is the geometry of dying—

and our grief is a closed circle

concentric in its company but radiating

like the fire does, and the glass festoons do,

and as all light will, arriving

from anywhere and touching anything.

O, the starlight—

when moved by a turbulent atmosphere—

how it spreads.

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Poems of Cruelty and Compassion

Poem with Too Much Rope in It

After the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

I’m thinking of humans who cut the testicles off other humans, who string up

their fellow humans and laugh. Of people who set other people alight for the crime of

uppity, for the crime of gay, for the crime of, I refuse. I’m worrying about

my fellow humans, who can hang a pregnant woman upside down, disembowel her,

leave the fetus dangling—

I’m thinking of the many loving humans I know. Sheltering humans. I’m worrying

about how many people after the war still thought Hitler’s big mistake was

not killing all the Jews. Wondering, too, about those who hid entire families in

a few small rooms, risking the murder of their own. How do we reconcile this—

the fervidly brave, the fervidly cruel. Happy informers. The disbelieving informed. Them

and Us. Who did this to you? I want to ask victim and perpetrator—

I want it to be someone’s fault: twisted leaders, bad parents, beatings.

Or maybe it’s a Darwinian experiment. Something coiled in our genes. Here are

the conditions: let’s see who lives, let’s see who fouls their soul. Either way,

I walk down the street with affable people who would do these things—dangle

suffocating humans from branches, drag them behind jouncing pickup trucks and laugh,

roast alive the very humans who maybe—in another life—they dearly love.

Is there a life in which I’m laughing along with them?

Knees

Tomorrow, my father gets his foot

cut off—too much pain for too long—

time for another divorce.

For years, he declared

he was too old for this.

Maybe he was too young.

What a shiver—sickness,

wheelchairs, walkers,

canes. There’s been talk

of complications,

of a cut above the knee—

like the hem on a sexy skirt.

But he will insist, he says,

on below the knee. March—

a bit of snow clings

to the ground, but in his garden

he’s planted spinach already.

By my front steps this morning,

the hyacinths just beginning

to bulge out of the ground

remind me of knees—

how green and incipient

we can always be.

Below the knee—

all the things

he has done,

has not done,

could do,

can still do,

on his knees.

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Category: Aquifer