swinging pendulum that never ceases
once set
into motion.
A Dream of Stopped-Up Drains
Köln, Germany
6 September 1977
1.
And then we came to the cathedral city of Köln on the wide Rhine River.
Never before had we come to the cathedral city of Köln on the wide
Rhine River.
In drumming rain the great Baroque cathedral rose over the rebuilt
city of Köln on the wide Rhine River.
“Look!”—but no matter how high you cast your eyes
you could not see the tops of the twin spires
of the great Baroque cathedral at Köln.
In the drumming rain, a sharp smell of drains in the cathedral city of Köln.
The ruins of the medieval city rebuilt on the wide Rhine River.
The great Baroque cathedral alone had been spared from Allied bombing.
So God protects His own churchmen, sometimes.
So God stoops to intervene in the affairs of men.
So God in His caprice selects who will live, who will die
at the time God selects, and no other.
Across the vast cathedral square of drumming rain and milling tourists
there arose the wish to believe in the God
of the great Baroque cathedral at Köln.
In our hotel room, top floor of the newly constructed Königshof,
a view from every window of the great Baroque cathedral of Köln
and a smell of backed-up drains.
In the bathroom amid the bright glittering tile, a smell of backed-up drains.
“Look!”—for in the tile floor near the sink, a drain measuring
approximately nine inches in circumference.
An open metal drain through which you could see dark water churning.
Dark water flecked with foam, or froth. In which something swam.
Unless it was vibrations?—we stared, we could not see.
A powerful smell rose from the drain.
A smell of time, a smell of anguish, a smell of spilt brains, a smell of
blue gas, a smell of raw life prevailing through time.
God is this power of raw, prevailing life.
A six-foot blond woman from the Königshof front desk came bringing
Buz Fresh aerosol and disinfectant and a deft whisk brush.
Brisk sound of faucets, toilet flushing. And again flushing.
(How the heart sinks, a toilet twice flushed!)
Perhaps something was retrieved from the drain for safekeeping, or
perhaps it was flushed away into oblivion.
No records are kept at the Königshof.
“I am very sorry, these things happen.”
The air was lavishly sprayed, a pungent flower scent. Out of the dark
German forest, sudden aroma of white lilies!
Carefully we placed the Köln telephone book over the drain.
A smell of stopped-up drains prevailed in the cathedral city of Köln
On the wide Rhine River, but we could no longer smell it.
I had journeyed to Köln to give a public appearance.
It was my duty in Köln to present myself in words.
Yet we were in a desolate rural area.
We had been brought here, to be taken elsewhere.
Along a road, a truck with a dented fender moved toward us.
The driver stopped. He spoke only German, a burly man with
strong hands and a close-shaved head.
His face was broad, frank and honest, modeled like a clay head.
His eyes shone flatly like polished glass.
Here was no man of mere language but a man of the soil.
Here was no man of mere poetry but a man of the people.
Here was a man upon whom the state could depend.
He would bring me to my public appearance
except I was not prepared.
I had misplaced my material, I had no words in any language!
That flimsy life raft upon which I had imagined I might survive.
How quickly and shamefully I spoke. Yet there was defiance
in my voice.
I heard myself declare: Yes. I am partly Jewish.
My family was Hungarian on my mother’s side, and Irish and German
Jewish on my father’s side.
My German-Jewish great-grandparents had emigrated to upstate
New York in the late 1890s. They’d settled in northern Niagara
County. They’d changed their name from Morgenstern to
Morningstar, wishing to become American.
These remote facts I explained to the driver.
I had nothing to provide except my history.
I thought—But I am not my history, am I?
I thought—But I am free of time, aren’t I?
Seeing the driver’s strong hands, I became agitated.
The man was working-class, his nails were blunt and edged with dirt.
He knew nothing of poetry, of subtlety and subterfuge.
He knew nothing of my public identity, his instinct was unerring.
We were in such a desolate place!
What facts are there in history except which place? Which time?
I was uttering words I had not ever uttered in any language.
“Please hold me, please be kind to me.”
My ancestors spoke, through the gritty soil stuffed into their mouths.
The man’s strong fingers were stroking and caressing my head.
Here was the simulation of protectiveness as when a father,
his thoughts distracted, takes time to comfort a frightened child.
The driver stroked my shoulders, my arms.
I was only a child, I began to cry.
I was very frightened as only children in their wisdom can be frightened.
This is my dream!–yet I could not prevent what would come next.
I thought—I must behave with dignity.
How surprised I would have been in my former life to see
myself on my knees in this desolate wooded place!
The landscape was foreign like the language.
The soil was rough, though sandy.
The sky was the hue of wet, wadded newsprint.
The wind smelled faintly of stopped-up drains.
At a horizon, the sun glowed like a hot coin.
The sun was a word for elsewhere, and another time.
When you turned to the sun for more light the sun faded,
like the fall into sleep.
On my knees I hid my face. I wasn’t crying, I think.
The driver closed his strong fingers around my neck and
began to squeeze, grunting with effort.
Death by manual strangulation. Which was not common.
To be strangled is a terrible way to die, but
I was not there for it.
Bloodline, Elegy: Su Qijian Family, Beijing
In the mud-colored Hai River a swirl of infant-girl bodies.
In the river-trance the infant girls are propelled with the current.
You stare, you blink—she has vanished.
But—here is another, and
soon, another.
How small, how fleeting, of no more consequence than a kitten
an infant girl drowned at birth
before the first breath has been drawn, and expelled—
No crying. We do not shatter the peace of the morning, with crying.
See how good we are!
In the mud-river so many, you could not count how many.
Out of the bloody womb the small bodies betray the infant girls
for they are revealed incomplete between the legs, pitiable
the not-male, the doomed.
We have not been drowned in the Hai River for we
are of the privileged Su Qijian family. And yet
ou
r dreams are filled with drowning amid the swirl
of infant-girl bodies in the Hai River
sweeping past our home.
We do not want to know how the infant girls are our sisters or our aunts.
We do not want to know how they are us, for (it is said) they are not us, that is all we have been told.
And we did not see these infant-girl bodies in the swirl of the mud-river, for we had not yet been born.
We are the largest family in Beijing. We are very proud to be of the
Su Qijian family of Beijing. We have been chosen for the honor
of meeting you today because we are a perfect family (it is said), for
we have been born and our baby girls not drowned. Bloodline is all,
and in our bloodline it is a marvel, it is a source of great pride, how
our mother, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers had not
been thrown into the mud-river to drown but were allowed to live.
So we know, we are blessed! We are very special amid
so many millions drowned in the Hai River as in the great Yangtze
and how many millions perished in the Revolution of no more
consequence than infant girls extinguished before they can draw
breath or cry.
Especially, we do not cry.
We have never cried.
You will not hear us cry—See how good we are! Even
in the agony of death, our tiny lungs filled with the mud-river.
We of the Su Qijian family have never lamented or mourned
for our privilege is to have been allowed to be born.
We are alive, there are twenty-nine of us alive and not one
of us has been drowned at birth. So we are blessed, we are of the
People’s Republic of China. We are alive.
For some Chinese couples just one baby was allowed. For some
others, more than one baby was allowed. And for some, girl babies
were allowed. We do not understand these decrees,
and we do not question.
Bloodline is the very god. Bloodline is the nation.
Bloodline is property of the Office of China State Council Information.
And then in a dream it is revealed—
it is the mothers of our family who drowned our sisters!
Long ago it happened, in those years
before we were born. It was a different China then (it is said),
it is not the same China now. Our beautiful mother
pleads for understanding. All our mothers weep and tear their hair
in shame! They would tear out their eyes that such ugliness
might spare them.
How is it possible, our mothers are those very mothers
who tossed the infant girls into the river to drown . . .
Oh, but it happened long ago. The world was different then.
Shuxia is saying, Junxia is saying, Lixia is saying,
they are not evil. Not one of the women of the Su Qijian family
is evil, they plead with us to understand, and to forgive.
Our babies who are your sisters were torn from our arms,
we could not nurse them, we were forbidden. You see,
we had no choice. We are but
female, we had no choice but to drown our own.
It is China thrumming with its many millions that is alive,
that is the marvel. In the distance you see the eye of our god
the China Central Television Tower, rising above the suety Beijing
skyline, that is a greater marvel. Rejoice! Our great nation
is the future, and your nation is of the past.
What is the meaning of our lives, we never ask.
The creatures of the hive do not question the hive.
The creatures of the river that do not drown
in the river do not question the river, for the river
has spared them, and that is the blessing. This is the meaning
of all of our lives, and not just Chinese lives.
That we are is the meaning, and that we have been blessed
is the meaning, and that we are not drowned
in the Hai River with our infant sisters is the meaning.
In parting here is our gift to you, our American visitors: a plastic
bag of photographs of Chinese monuments, Chinese citizens, the mud-colored Hai River at dawn when it glitters with light like the scales of a great serpent whose head you cannot see thousands of miles upstream, and whose tail you cannot see thousands of miles downstream, that abides forever.
Harvesting Skin
The skin is the largest organ in the body. The skin of an average-sized man has an area of approximately 17 square feet and weighs about 5 pounds.
—medical handbook
Fast & unfaltering to remove skin
from the dead & soon-to-be
is a delicate task.
Few physicians are qualified.
You must have advanced degrees
in human-tissue studies & (of course)
surgery. I’d
begun at twenty-
one.
Burn-unit specialist is my title.
You see me on the scene at executions, I
am booked weeks in advance.
Harvesting (human) skin
requires a steady hand & eye
& I take pride in customers
satisfied.
For skin is a body-commodity.
We seek skin, kidneys, liver, heart,
bones, corneas—
for research.
In fact these are for sale.
I am not a salesman but a supplier.
Our skin is sold to customers by
the square centimeter.
What’s our price? Depends
upon the quality of the skin.
If torn, mutilated, bruised, etc.
If perfect, it’s expensive.
And all depends
(you know this)
upon the Market.
(What is the Market, no
one knows. Ever-shifting
as the tide our God
cannot be worshipped,
only just supplied.)
At twenty-one
so young,
my hand shook. Forty
minutes to an hour & still the job
was often bungled & the harvest
cheaply sold.
Now I am experienced. I am
skilled. Ten to twenty minutes
after the condemned is killed
is all I require, &
ten harvestings per day
is not unusual.
Swift incisions into the dermis.
Swift peelings. Swift removal.
On ice the commodity is placed
& rushed to skin-graft artists
& their patients.
Our prices are high, only wealthy
customers can buy.
All benefit: burn, cancer, injury &
cosmetic patients, & the condemned
who are spared lifetime in prison.
(This season, between arrest
& harvest
as brief as 48 hours!)
After skin, organs & bones & corneas
are harvested, what remains
is cleanly burnt.
The donor does not know the recipient
of his skin. The donor does not (sometimes)
know that he is to die.
For why
such knowledge,
lacking power?
Yet his skin embraces the recipient.
As an eyeball in an eye
Socket, & blood
Embraced by blood.
The old way was wasteful, so
much skin unharvested.
Our new way is cruel
you will say. But when
you require skin,
you will bargain,
and
you will buy.
(The speaker is a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Hospital, Beijing.)
“This is the Time for Which We Have Been Waiting”
Dear Jim,
I *finally got your letter enclosing your letter enclocussing your letter which was so ompportant foe me, thannkuok yuon very much. In time this fainful bsiness will soonfeul will soon be onert. Tnany anany goodness. If S lossiee eii wyyonor wy sinfaignature.
I hope I hope I make it.
Bill
(handwritten signature)
The first snowfall brings chaos.
First the horizon disappears then
you disappear. When
William Carlos Williams suffered his first stroke
he was sixty-eight years old, in 1951. His second,
the following year. No man more loved
our American speech. Vulgar & graceless
as oversized boots he loved it. The pimply-
faced girl he loved. Forms inside things gnarly
to the touch. Smokestacks belching flame, mustard
weed, chain-link fencing. Steely river seething with acid
& sparrows picking in the dirt, like Death. Yet
still just sparrows. Coarse beauty of nasturtiums,
& fried oysters. Beauty of spiderwebs,
Brueghel’s hunters in the snow. Except
maybe the physician saw & heard too much!
Maybe what the poet saw & heard
was in his own head! Maybe in Rutherford,
N.J., there was nothing. Maybe
the poet was in despair, fierce lover
Of women & adulterer & this morning waking to discover
Someone has dressed him in an old man’s underwear—
gunmetal-gray, woolen-itchy, soiled cuffs
at bony wrists & ankles & the crotch unsnapped.
Opens his mouth to curse
& words choke like phlegm. A doctor doesn’t expect
to die like the rest of us . . . Waking in the sun
in Flossie’s garden back of the yellow house
the terror strikes him maybe he’s dreamt it all?—male
hands lifting a thrashing bloody infant
from behind female thighs, &
ironweed along the railroad embankment
tough enough to thrive in cinders, &
there he’s laughing typing on the old Underwood manual
words leaping astonished out of the mute keyboard, keys
so worn you can’t read the letters. And
those clouds—
clouds I’ve been noticing this morning, too.
Diesel-dirtied, broken & yet dignified in motion
American Melancholy Page 5