Giving Myself Up to it
She confuses things, lately escarole and escargot. Other things she remembers, sauerbraten, stollen, spaetzle.
Learning English, my Vietnamese and Brazilian friends confused chicken with kitchen the way I confuse German words for history—Geschichte—and face—Gesicht—and poem—Gedicht.
So much of history confuses me, all those British Henreys and French Louis, the Peace of Westphalia, Treaty of Versailles, the Hapsburgs and Prussians and Swabians.
Describing my brown eyes, flushed cheeks, the scar at my brow, I say Gesicht. Trying to face up to history, I say ich muss Geschichte mich stellen, I must give myself up to it.
She warned me what people would think if I studied German. The war, the war, the war, she said.
Pennsylvania Dutch isn’t Dutch but German. Aryans aren’t European but Asian.
Yes, swastika emerges from Sanskrit and might be honored in Hinduism, but ancient history cannot redeem current events.
Dead relatives visit me in dreams, begging to explain. Saving face is hard, I say, and salvaging culture even harder. Still distinguishing between them and me, I worry that repeat and repent are kissing cousins.
With other tourists, I visited Dachau. The buildings were austere, the signs easily legible, the entrance hardly horrifying. Later in Washington’s museum, I saw piles of shoes and stacks of luggage and felt squeezed, the dead, the living.
I wanted to see, sehen, without staring, starren, without looking away, wegsehen. I wanted to feel horrified, or was it diverted? How do I repent, bereuen, of that?
Gardener’s Spring
This morning, as I have every spring for eight years, I’m pulling up landscape cloth some gardener laid down decades ago. Every season there’s more of it. I’d rather pull up weeds than consider plastic leaching with soft rain into dry roots. I think I’ve got it all but I never have. When I think to thrust my shovel deeply into dark soil, crumbly and cool, damp and good for planting, there it is, always an impediment. Another swatch of black plastic, another patch to yank away. I’ll scatter composted leaves into a new trench. I’ll toss in a few stones for drainage. Isn’t it always this way, the one thing our ancestors laid down so carefully
American Ghazal
For years I confused aspen with birch, their white skin— I should say bark—the birch’s peeling like sunburned tight skin.
We reveal fantasy—or is it history—through stars, their angled arrangement, the twins, water bearer, hanged man, torched man, the excited crowd, their bright skin.
I observe brass knuckles, reflective sunglasses, lipstick, Halloween masks, surgical masks, masks for Mardi Gras, tattooed sleeves, wool mittens tucked under jacket cuffs, anything to spite skin.
Bobcats, pheasants, white-tailed deer, one black bear cub crowd his father’s taxidermy studio as the boy imagines other creatures he might skin.
In the photograph, a narrow-waisted woman turns away from the tree, the rope, the shadow, her lipsticked mouth, dress smoothly pressed, her presentable image, her polite skin.
An adult crane flings its wide wings open, its energetic gesture auspicious, surely signifying hope or peace or justice, its thin pinfeathers embedded in flesh, follicles, not quite skin.
We’ve all read Fahrenheit 451, paper’s temperature when it burns. How hot are the coals, how high the flames before they ignite skin?
Is history the lynchpin of justice or just the goblin that haunts us? What more will generations deny, deny, deny before they indict skin?
Lynn Domina says, “I am the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Inland Sea, Corporal Works, and Framed in Silence, and one chapbook, Killing Him. My more recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, the museum of americana, About Place, and other periodicals. I currently live in Marquette, Michigan, along the beautiful shore of Lake Superior.”