Poems from Chopin's Piano


	*Eastern Europe After the War*

	Wisps of memory ragged dips in the grass A few years earlier, millions died in sub-zero temperature Stripped to their underwear, they were whipped beaten with fists and rifle butts their infants ripped from their arms Their prayers to God changed nothing Shot in the neck, they were kicked into ditch after ditch Those still living clutched at prayer shawls or thrice-blessed amulets but their words their tears called down no power Their deaths did not alter the sky, which continues to shelter their murderers The earth that churned for days afterward has yielded nothing but fragments The years swept by, blurring the landscape though, on occasion, something in humanity twitched A list of the names of the missing slipped from official fingers and drifted into history In Eastern Europe, not a stitch was mended The gash in the abandoned universe could not be healed

	*Counting the Holocaust*

	He tried to get a handle on the Holocaust: let others immerse themselves in questions of time and intention He would leave the Nazis to history the endless litany of camps to architects and statisticians Let the professors tussle over Hitler's evil genius the altruism of Schindler the German muse of Goldhagen He wanted to know one thing only — what six million of anything added up to . . . and so he counted: grains of uncooked rice until the gallon jugs he dropped them into filled his kitchen un- matched contact lenses newly-minted pennies then soda pop bottle caps battered shoe boxes abandoned valises and six million periods in 12-point Gothic type: thirty-seven hundred and four unconsumed pages He was counting the Holocaust and he kept counting.

	*A Dance on the Poems of Rilke*

	I remember a Czech dancer who danced on the poems of Rilke. — Stennie Pratomo-Gret In the particular hell of Ravensbrück where Gypsy girls were sterilized and babies were drowned at birth where dysentery lung cancer and typhus took life after life and grotesque experiments in the inducement of infection and pain were cultivated as a fine art where women of every European nation slaved for Siemens through endless moonless nights and cut trees dug pits loaded and unloaded railway cars and barges where abortion was inevitable and sexual cruelty the rule and where a woman could be duly tortured for using rags as tampons or merely for adjusting her dress a certain Czech woman who knew every word danced to the poems of Rilke moving sinuously to each of his Orphean sonnets bowing gracefully with the first notes of each Elegie: she felt the dark music of Rilke’s heart each soaring leap of the spirit each lunge toward grief Though she is long gone and we no longer know her name she is the one who showed even a halting step could be a triumph and a dance on the poems of a dead poet might redeem

	*Names on a List*

	January 23, 1995 David Ben-Zino, Adi Rosen, Damian Rosovski — Who were these soldiers Islamic Jihad killed? In Tel Aviv I had slept in a young soldier’s room — my shirts hung for a while in his closet, my head crushed his pillow, and my feet drank the chill from his floor. Was he among the murdered, this only son of my friends? No, he was not in Netanya in the third week of January, he was not in Tel Aviv, not in Israel, not in the Middle East at all. Then let us not speak his name, not even in a whisper: who are we to trust the gods or the unseen powers? My friends shall keep their son, and I will sleep without dreaming. But who were these young soldiers? Rafael Mizrahi, Yehiel Sharvit, Yuval Tuvya — how did they live and what did they live for? A month earlier, in Jerusalem, I saw two soldiers at ease at the Haas Promenade. They were there to guard children and the teachers of these children and Uzis hung at their backs in stark diagonals. They looked like soldiers, but I could see they were really older brothers and would-be boyfriends, and one joked with the teacher whose clouds of copper hair outshone the midday sun; the other ate his lunch and half-sprawled in the scorched grass. I saw their sisters and cousins in the Judean Desert, in the spillway of light that opened into dark, conflicted Jericho, and they were waiting in the alleyways of the Old City where tribes of tourists materialized from stone and filled their arms with Yemenite jewelry and Druse cloth. I understand, but who was Gilad Gaon? who Eran Gueta? who was David Hasson? who Eitan Peretz? I saw them in Abu Ghosh, wolfing down hummus in olive oil, small hills of falafel. And they were at the bus terminal in Tel Aviv, hauling their battered duffels at the Bahá’í shrine in Haifa keeping watch in the sacred gardens and I saw them anointed with fire in the sunset that blossomed over Ashkelon. But you know these words are lies and your hearts are not fooled by my stories for Yaron Blum is dead Ilie Dagan is dead Amir Hirschenson is dead Anan Kadur is dead Maya Kopstein is dead Soli Mizrahi is dead Avi Salto is no longer with us Daniel Tzikuashvili is no longer with us All the bright young flames of Israel’s sun are dying and I am here speaking their names to you.