Igniting the effigy, churning mountains of smoke scorch my corneas, surge into my mind and asphyxiate my memory. I try to feel gratitude.

We will never be here again.

Ralph Angel

Breaking and Entering
by Ralph Angel

Many setups. At least as many falls.
Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here.
Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenous
wildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop,
scrub jay behind the Clear Lake Saloon.
And when she darts into a drugstore for a chocolate-covered
almond bar, sparrow hawks get the picture
and drive off in her car.
Easy as 8th & Spring Street,
a five-course meal the size of a dime.
Easy as vistas admired only from great distance,
explain away the mystery
and another thatched village is cluster-bombed.
Everyone gets what he wants nowadays.
Anything you can think of is probably true.
And so, nothing. Heaven on earth. The ruse
of answers. A couple-three-times around the block
and ignorance is no longer a good excuse.
There were none. Only moods
arranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottle
full of roses, the dark, rickety tables about the room.
And whenever it happens, well, it’s whatever it takes,
a personality that is not who you are
but a system of habitual reactions to another
light turning green, the free flow of
traffic at the center of the universe where shops
are always open and it’s a complete
surprise each time you’re told that minding your own business
has betrayed your best friend. But that’s over,
that’s history, the kind of story that tends to have an ending,
the code inside your haunted head.
Easy as guilt. As waking and sleeping, sitting down
to stand up, sitting down to go out walking,
closing our eyes to see in the nocturnal
light of day. “Treblinka
was a primitive but proficient
production line of death,” says a former SS Untersharfurer
to the black sharecropper-grandchild of slavery
who may never get over
the banality of where we look.
Only two people
survived the Warsaw uprising, and the one
whose eyes are paths inward, down into the soft grass,
into his skeleton,
who chain-smokes and drinks, is camera shy,
wears short-sleeved shirts, manages to mumble,
“If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”

"Herodotus uses the past to provide illustrations of situations and characters for use in his present time. He does this because he sees time as circular: history revolving around and around, with the same themes and problems arising again and again. The events that take place in his Histories are often caused by flaws in character, but behind these flaws lies the circular wheel of fate, which raises up and pulls down cities and people in equal measure..."1

William de Brailles 1235

The concept of the wheel of fortune persisted along side the six Ages of Man, which posited time moved from the Creation to the Apocalypse. Mankind had entered the sixth age and awaited the Second Coming and the end of all time.

Crowned Fate sits turning the wheel.
"I am borne again to the stars;

I exalt on high;

Reduced, I descend;

Lowest, I am ground by the wheel"

The Ages of Man are represented within.

1. John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction

Firsts (Redo)

Your tined proposal glides over her teeth,
cattle prods a smile,
then slithers through the gritting.
Over the threshold,
dust bowl bedroom
tumble weeds
fold in Minerva's curse to turn
a temple to a tomb.
Blood caked on sand dunes,
the platelets pile in the cracks
of your lips like bitter berry juice,
belly warm violet
dries to a sticky sweet stain;
the permanent mark
of this grotesque
imitation of intimacy.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Babi Yar

No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today I am as old in years

as all the Jewish people.

Now I seem to be

a Jew.

Here I plod through ancient Egypt.

Here I perish crucified, on the cross,

and to this day I bear the scars of nails.

I seem to be

Dreyfus.

The Philistine

is both informer and judge.

I am behind bars.

Beset on every side.

Hounded,

spat on,

slandered.

Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace

stick their parasols into my face.

I seem to be then

a young boy in Byelostok.

Blood runs, spilling over the floors.

The barroom rabble-rousers

give off a stench of vodka and onion.

A boot kicks me aside, helpless.

In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.

While they jeer and shout,

"Beat the Yids. Save Russia!"

some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.

0 my Russian people!

I know

you

are international to the core.

But those with unclean hands

have often made a jingle of your purest name.

I know the goodness of my land.

How vile these anti-Semites-

without a qualm

they pompously called themselves

the Union of the Russian People!

I seem to be

Anne Frank

transparent

as a branch in April.

And I love.

And have no need of phrases.

My need

is that we gaze into each other.

How little we can see

or smell!

We are denied the leaves,

we are denied the sky.

Yet we can do so much --

tenderly

embrace each other in a darkened room.

They're coming here?

Be not afraid. Those are the booming

sounds of spring:

spring is coming here.

Come then to me.

Quick, give me your lips.

Are they smashing down the door?

No, it's the ice breaking ...

The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.

The trees look ominous,

like judges.

Here all things scream silently,

and, baring my head,

slowly I feel myself

turning gray.

And I myself

am one massive, soundless scream

above the thousand thousand buried here.

I am

each old man

here shot dead.

I am

every child

here shot dead.

Nothing in me

shall ever forget!

The "Internationale," let it

thunder

when the last anti-Semite on earth

is buried forever.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood.

In their callous rage, all anti-Semites

must hate me now as a Jew.

For that reason

I am a true Russian!

Le Coq

Waving his floppy red crown
and boasting, a broad golden chest,
he paraded his intent to make more of himself.
But she stuck him with a needle
before he could act.

Beak down and wings spread out,
blood found its way back to the gutter
and down to the fields where the women dig,
in the soil as black as my grandmothers
once painted their teeth.

The flaccid neck droops off the edge
of the round cedar platter, and
the golden chest is dull and still.
Deceptive feathers, piled high somewhere,
make for stuffing where we had none.

His sound is no more in our ears,
screeching at dawn toward the east.
Take his head and his crest to the forest,
where the bear wakes.

Identity

Jean-Marc rose to get the bottle of cognac and two glasses. Then, after swallowing a mouthful: "At the end of my hospital visit, he began to reminisce. He reminded me what I must have said when I was sixteen. When he did that, I understood the sole meaning of friendship as it's practiced today. Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it."

Milan Kundera, Identity