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Sometimes her past spans out, a bridge over a deadly gorge; or climbs for a moment (“I have seen much kindness”) like an angelic ladder; or marches through the Brandenburg Gate.
“I had a friend, who said Why not learn German? And until he spoke I never thought I could.” Walking to nightschool (hard on the shoe-leather) in classbound Thirties London.
“But when I got to Germany, Herr Doktor used to read us Schiller, after dinner!
“In summer every cherry — I remember great, black cherries, in the garden — every one was maggoty. Herr Doktor he crunched them up, maggots and all, and laughed.”
Found between the pages of Rembrandt’s Schicksal (For Anne. Souvenir. Berlin 1936.): a ticket to the Games.
“That’s History! You’ve heard of Jesse Owens? Oh, Hitler hated him! …There were SS, officers, billeted near us, where we lived out in Dahlem. Very smart. Such boots… But the crowd was all for him: for Owens.
“Then the old dentist — he had been so kind, treated an abscess, wouldn’t take a pfennig — he said, You must not visit me again. He said, I must not treat with such as you. He said: Go home, dear miss, while still you may.”
The gate, the marching, the bridge strung out across a chasm. Owens on the racetrack. The deaths of angels.
“And so, it happened. To have known such things… I wasn’t meant to make old bones. When I was seven, in the orphanage I heard them say, She’ll not live out the year.”
Pooling through greenwoods and snake-enchanted sweeps of quiet, monstrous foliage, we make at sunset, an unscheduled stop.
Worlds of haunted water shimmer down to a lost glint. In silhouette shrouded boughs come closer, hover, and vanish into shadow.
Missssss…. issssss… isssssss….. the train hisses and clips the air ..…isss….ippp.. and ....eeeeeeeeeee….. howls.
Between the freighted names of Jackson and Greenwood, we drawn down blinds, turn inward from overwhelming night,
as history through darkness tracks the tale of stain and struggle, of Medgar Evers, and his assassin, gone to the long grave.
Outside, the sticky, ticking air lies doggo. Gathering speed, our train maps up the South behind it, faces down the dark.
She wears this city like a garment, easy as scarlet linen, bias-cut slanting over one brown shoulder
A dozen madonnas sleep in her profile vanquished emperors glow dark in her hazy green glance
As shaded at noon under a white awning she orders up pink-peppered fish and a salad of leaves
And gesturing from the wrist, describes the etchings of shields, threads Virgil with small ringed fingers
Her voice a shift of tongues her laughter sashaying down the steps and across the Borghese Gardens.
Un’altra bianca della casa, bright, beaded. Sparrows slow among the crumbs, the humming heat.
Che vuoi? On any day like this she might set aside, lightly all the illustrious past
strap on golden sandals head for the South.
Like an acrobat falling (and it seems to the crowd a hopeless, a thrilling moment) I tumble through the dangerous past limbs whirling:
There are so many ways to be damaged: the crash, the flounder the impossible angle the flat slam the violent distortion
and in that long moment I remember them all.
So it is not I, but the acrobat within, aided by who knows what lucky grace or remembered discipline
grapples for balance in the anxious air comes right, and to the crowd’s relief and guilty chagrin, lands once again twin-footed, steady
with a flourish, even; with a casuist’s smile.
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