songanddancegirl

EYELASHES

SHOES   EYELASHES    PROSTHETIC LIMBS

Suitcases  gold teeth  dolls  in piles on  platforms

Work Will Make You Free      Arbeit  Macht  Frei

No It Won’t   We will starve +torture you  especially if

you are a twin   We will incinerate you   because we can

Throw your babies into the air   +catch them on bayonets

You ain’t seen nothing yet  Juden

But wait!  A ray of light  William Glied  14  had already lost

his family  Now emaciated   with typhoid   he hears the cries

of newborns  & wonders if he is dead   Do angels cry in Nazi

death camps?  No    7babies born that Spring  7pregnant inmates

spared by rough beasts   As delirium of degradation slouches toward

it’s End  

70 yrs. ago yesterday Auschwitz liberated   Russian Jewish soldier

down on his knees  cradles 10 yr old twinless-twin   Sister tortured

beyond human recognition  Dr. Mengele  Chief Sadist  crouches on

slow thighs   Escapes to Brazil   Will he wear the yellow star on the

Styx crossing?

The extermination doesn’t seem that long ago  Atrocities unfathomable

until a new breed of Nazi beheads prisoners  orange suited   with small

carving knives   Well scripted executions  Jihad coming to malls +villages

everywhere?  A recent archeological find in the Levant region places Homo

Sapiens at the dawn of Civilization

But this must be oxymoronic  no?  Might it have been the interbreeding

with Neanderthals?  Or is it bred in the bone?  This uncivilized ape we

continue  to call Homo   Did you know that modern Sapiens lose short term

memory capacity yearly?   All that remains in the end are long held events

Like the train rides in cattle cars as children

__

About 1.3 million were deported to Auschwitz from 1940-45

About 1.1 million Jews  The remainder: non-Jewish Poles  Roma

& Sinti (Gypsies)  Soviet prisoners  & others   Of these 1.1 million

people were exterminated there (Globe & Mail January 27, 2015)

Winter  2015

2043

WHERE  WILL  I  BE  IN  2043

when the BIG meteorite passes within inches of

the Earth?  Should it veer a few miles off course

I’ll be in the same place as you?  Starts with an O

ends with an N   (not oblivion)  You must work

much harder to insinuate yourself into this poem

..a long novel just like your life; you were going through

it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there

were bloodstains.   (James Salter  Last Night)

That home    An uncle shrieked: Turn some Goddamned 

lights off   it looks like a 3 ring circus over there   We did not

Same uncle to sleep over  Parents escaped  London 7 days 1978

Barred the door at 10 pm  Heard him banging+cursing for 16

minutes  freezing March night in Great White North   He never

came back for more

There is a longing for the past   so innately human  For your own

personal Eden   Even if much of it is  fantasy  playing in repertory

for the duration   For a time when you felt more  expected more  

knew less   Cervical spine not yet compressed by gravity  rear-enders 

bad feldenkrais teacher  from Arizona

Lifted+thrusted  lifted+thrusted   Called you at 11:30 one night to ask

about your perfume!  By then 36 revolutions of the earth ’round the sun

Knew enough to run from scum-bag guru  with moves   When the meteorite

comes you will wear your after-life face proudly  But who will recognize you?

No one who knew you when you were coltish   Whatever holds people together

will be gone

___

It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel  than for a poor man to

enter a woman of means   Just go to the graveyard  and ask around 

(Mark Strand  1998 Pulitzer Prize)

Winter  2015

                                         octogenarion