Vivian Shipley
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended. . .
--William Shakespeare
Guilford, Connecticut Resident, Former Nazi Guard.
Below New Haven Register headlines: it's you.
My next door neighbor for eighteen years, have you
been hovering over Mauthausen, a helicopter, a hawk,
or a dirigible, fearful someone would poke a hole
in your story, light a match? Accent of Ukrainia
clings like seeds of milkweed but for the reporters,
your tongue, mute peninsula, drags up the sound for no.
Stooped at seventy two, I calculate the dead weight.
You were my son's 4-H leader, took nightly strolls
on the green with Dylan, your yellow lab. As October
shortened life, you remembered to feed sparrows
after the birdbath froze over. A newscaster calls me
for a live on-the-air interview. I should have suspected
something, knowing you raise pigeons to feed a falcon,
coops positioned like Siamese twins joined at the chest.
You never invited me to fields back of Bishop's Orchard
for a hunt. So, all day, I hunk hosta, day lilies, hoping you
will come outside, tomatoes, zucchini in hand, to trade
your garden for mine. It's details that seduce me, to know
first hand in what position most died, get a metaphor
for bodies in box cars. A heart can talk itself into anything
while alibis revise themselves, but one story will finally
catch another off guard, crisscrossing. I stay alert, ready.
With arms elbowed on your fence, I rest then start digging
again until dusk. I want to learn about training at Trawniki,
about power. Does it feel like B-52H Stratofortress bombers
lumbering on a runway in England, tail lifting to make
Kosovo quake, evaporating those below into white noon sky?
To pass time, I play connect the dots with numbers you
rounded up, leveled to ash. Think, I want to say, of Poniatowa,
of all who resisted you by staying alive, who wake as you do
but with memory of mother, father, sister, brother, daughter,
son you denied them. Pilgrims in a Holy Week procession
some carry names, photographs, some knowledge in faces.
A conductor, your hand extended, have you emptied hair
from lockets, wedding rings, teeth? Neat, I can imagine how
you would have toed out a cigarette burning in a man's hand.
You do not come out that first day, then the next, while
editorials debate what to do with you, murderer, torturer
now that you have been found. To stave off impending
deportation what will you offer to do? Taking a widow
to find notebooks in her husband's breastpocket, giving
her poems she could dry in sun, to soothe her, would
you say how ink if not his breathwords have been saved?
A week passes. I continue to mulch with the same need
that made me travel to see the Museo di Criminologia
Medioevale in San Gimignano, Italy. The Inquisition,
torture devices when a death sentence was not about
quietness and efficiency. Thumbscrews, branding irons,
skull crushers, tongue clamps, pear, spiked speculum,
are tucked away in a Tuscan hillside. My breath fogged
the glass. More than six feet tall, an iron maiden towered
in the corner. Spotlights were on a spiked interior, bread
and juice to keep the victim alive and alert. Description
of water torture was less visually interesting, not like
a spiked chair which was wooden with inch-high studs.
Here, there were multimedia extras: a voice bellowing,
a woman who admitted guilt, pleaded for mercy. I left her.
Exiting, a smiling ticket taker, his wave, his Buon giorno
eased reentry to land as peaceful as that seen from trains
on the last ride Jews took from Lublin to Majdanek,
Belzec, and Sobibor. Straight sand paths funneled into
flat Polish woods of birch and pine, millions of trees
like the dead, anonymous as gravestones Germans used
to pave new road. As my neighbor, you have grown
safe, escaping into your daughters. You lined gardens
with day lilies I clumped, bordered them with hosta
I shared. Each autumn, wind splayed our maple leaves
like shoes, hair carved into piles by guards as if dividing
beef: shank, loin, flank, round. I want to know what
you remember shoveling clay from rock, sprinkling
bone meal like holy water on snowdrops, digging
roses to repot. What does the color of pale roots trigger?
Your porch drips with wisteria, the lavender petals
like moth wings. Honeyed afternoons cannot lull me
into believing the years have erased the particulars
I yearn to hear. Darkness pulls the street lamp, bats dive
into halos alive with insects who never see the light,
who are drawn to it as I am to you. A carrion crow
tugging at suet, your darkness is in me, lifts my wings
on air tasting of salt blown in from Long Island Sound.
Copyright © 1999 by Vivian Shipley