|
“History” Jane Augustine Memory comes out of death, dissolution of form. Poetic form is anti‑death, anti‑memory in its reinstatement of potent living presences. After a friend was killed in a mountaineering accident, images of 9/11’s deaths resurfaced in my mind, and I wrote “History” on July 15, 2002, conjoining memoire and anti‑memoire through the interchange of sorrows. A span of time. The literal and the rupture. (i) fragmented mind “heart broken” but it beats, or, that is, a muscle contracts relaxes — But that mountain man slipped, fell, struck his head, died instantly nor does anyone know when “for me” — The mountains stand: “Blood of Christ” (shed, it is said, for —) But they are far, misty and blue witness as one sees them from the cemetery gate, Rosita, Colorado with its sign: 1870. Dust of pioneers mingles in mind at the great cemetery where in Manhattan, 9/11/01 the towers stood flaming tipped slowly, fell, thousands dead — dead, dead, thousands dead — Repeatedly the man falls a hundred storeys on his black‑jacket wings. The video/audio tape records the sound of the body hitting the ground — another — another Dead, dead and the tapes now in storage. What use to sit by the mountain man’s body, That no‑longer‑he who should not — she has to say it over — should not, like all the other young, should not have died. (ii) MISSING the sign read on the supermarket window Rosalie Paisano, [digital banner in the mind above Times Square in moving white lights, dot a f t e r d o t a b o v e d o t 3 0 3 0 3 0 weeks The dark smoke closed in— (You cannot save your child) “I cannot save — I will try ... ” No “I”, but that name, body, heart forever in the ash of the gray body no body the weeping ghost of ash that walks out of the smoke. A movie reel unrolls, replays and walks. (iii) “...nothing to do,” she finally, months later, told her girl‑friend, “but walk back to Harlem (refugee, as from Tibet, or across Poland) But at 57th Street I began to cramp and bleed, and so I lost it — ” (iv) The great gap, the great invisible mountain of blood, fire, flesh that towers in the empty sky over the river The vast sky over the Sangré de Cristos into which the wind carries the mountain man’s ashes not to rise again (v) Stand in line. Walk out on the temporary plywood deck. Take out a camera. Click. A child starts to write his name in the history of the living who passed by the plywood wall, but hasn’t time to finish. The crowd has to move on. Develop the film. Not a good shot. You couldn’t see to the bottom of what will never be buried again. Bio: Jane Augustine has published two recent poetry books, Arbor Vitae (Marsh Hawk Press 2002) and Transitory (Spuyten Duyvil 2002). She is a scholar of women in modernism and the editor of The Gift by H.D.: The Complete Text (University Press of Florida, 1998). |