Lorrie Goldensohn
CALCULUS OF DEATH
Death is neither mother nor brother.
Death does not count as a family member
Although it joins all families.
Here is how you do not count.
Here is how you may not assign numbers to Death.
Marek Edelman died in his nineties
Living an exemplary life in war in peace.
Josef Mengele did not.
Josef died too in his nineties
Enjoying health. As to his example?
Do not think of it, the cunning
Butcher of Auschwitz.
When Marek Edelman went
To the Umschlagplatz, empowered
To de-select sick Jews from the camp trains
He took the healthy, and though
Her mother begged for her life
He passed over a fourteen year-old
To select Zosia for the last spot remaining--
Zosia was his best courier and she
Was needed for the resistance.
To the end of his life, Edelman
Remembered the girl he had
Chosen to pass over to Death
How the numbers were not in her favor.
KEITH DOUGLAS: ALAMEIN TO D-DAY PLUS 4
In the quiet of the archive they bring me
the dead boy’s drawings in a leather box; also,
the squashed bluebooks that on impulse a master
rescued from the trash behind his pupil’s door:
all brilliance and cheek.
He grins in a photo
snapped as he paused in the rush towards battle,
arms stretching over the truck he stole to get there,
grille and headlights nosing him from behind.
His left forearm eaten by desert sun.
The brim of his officer’s cap shades the handsome face
on which soft hair straggles over his upper lip.
He wrote “How to Kill” before the first blast--
where he saw the wire and the peg--but tripped it
anyway, a sort of resignation overtaking him.
Dazed. In stretchers and camp-beds, conscious
at intervals--watching the orderly’s huge scissor
shred his favorite waistcoat, within earshot of bombs
in Tobruk--he passed by rail for a thousand miles
to Cairo Hospital: a clean bed, books on a shelf.
At noon in the café,
a stranger, reaching for sweets beyond his tray,
brushes his bare arm against my arm, a simple
electricity stiffening the small hairs:
when my eyes touch his eyes, we look away.
In a fold of library time I shiver at the mind’s flame
burning the economical coal of your dreams--
while in the shallow grave, the wild dog
exhumes a face or a leg for food.
Someone at a table behind me coughs--
I turn involuntarily--not the one
who had to live so quick. Shock
from a mortar shell finally did for him,
or a sliver so fine it never left a mark.
USUFRUCT
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living…the dead have neither powers nor rights over it…”
Thomas Jefferson
If earth belongs to the living
then what is the place of the dead?
Or yet more perplexing,
of those who are dying…
Dying on a pallet in the schoolhouse,
a boy wrapped in the overwhelming
stench of his wound.
Dying in the ditches both fast and slow--
after the squadron passes.
Dying after the chassis
smashes against concrete. Black shadow
growing swiftly in the driver’s eyes, obscuring
the child strapped in the up-ended seat,
bleeding behind her.
Closing a book with a tattered cover,
I shut away a dead person’s words.
Although they still belong to me.
Licking the flap,
I seal a dead person’s photo
in the tomb of an envelope.
The blood of so many killed in my name
acrid in my nostrils
close to my living face.
I give away a pink coat
once worn by my dead mother--
I think her smell clings to it--
and put my flowers in her blue glass bowl.
Copyright © Lorrie Goldensohn 2015
Lorrie Goldensohn has published poems in The New Republic, Yale
Review, Notre Dame Review, and Salmagundi. Columbia
University Press published two books of hers, one a study of Elizabeth Bishop, which was
nominated for a Pulitzer, another a book on 20th century British and American
soldier poets, nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award, and a third, an
anthology of American War Poetry. She is now retired, but taught for many years at Vassar
College.
Her poem 'Dirt Dust Dinginess and Contamination' appeared in Molly Bloom 7.
Her poem 'Dirt Dust Dinginess and Contamination' appeared in Molly Bloom 7.