Louis Finson, The Four Elements, 1611It was like a hanging: being marched along streets with others, through great institutional doors, up stairs, to a desk, the groaning inbox.
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They threw the bodies down the stairs, opened the warehouse door, rolled them inside, where the dead were logging hours on the loading dock.
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Under the bridge, the alchemy of dawn is failing in its ancient transmutation, carbon dioxide and mercury sloughing off molecules of shit.
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The final radiance arrives: everyone ossifies, tipping statues undercut by erosion, skeletons in derelict museums punching out, departing.
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The lovers dressed, pulling underwear from under the chaise, stockings from the mantle, fur from bushes, hiding their feelers, hooves, horns.
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Before they burned the bodies, they killed them; before they killed them they tortured them; before they tortured them, they gave them jobs.
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Impossible not to forget the beautiful men, the children clever at their books, women full of wisdom, dead, my own body vaporized, my nation.
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We were carrying bags from the grocer, polishing hammers, playing cards, dreaming of lost bodies, when the effacing brilliance distracted us.
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Once we imploded the world enlarged, eroding every trace that anything had vanished, rain reclaiming our very atoms the better not to mourn us.
Hey, Terry, my dad was in Buchenwald. When I was a kid listening to his stories of that place, I thought none of it made sense. Years later when I started writing about what happened to him, it made less sense. The whole world he talked about was crazy, hunger and death and begging for a smile where ever he looked.
ReplyDeleteYour poem here feels like that.
Thanks.
Thank YOU, John. I wasn't quite thinking in that territory, but I see the connection.
ReplyDelete