beside an icy river
where the girl had turned up frostbitten
wearing only a soiled slip
her hair yanked out
her teeth broken
* * *
All the history you’ve ever read
tells you this is what men do
this is only a sliver of the reflection
of the beast
who is a fixture of human history
and the places you heard of as a boy
that were his latest stalking grounds
Auschwitz Dachau Treblinka
and the names of their dead
and their numberless dead whose names have vanished
each day now find their rolls swelled
with kindred souls
new names new numbers
from towns and villages
that have been scorched from the map
* * *
1993 may as well be 1943
and it should be clear now
that the beast in his many guises
the flags and vestments
in which he wraps himself
and the elaborate titles he assumes
can never be outrun
* * *
As that girl with the broken teeth
loaded into an ambulance
strapped down on a stretcher
so she wouldn’t claw her own face
will never outrun him
no matter where she goes
solitary or lost in a crowd
the line she follows
however straight or crooked
will always lead her back to that room
like the chamber at the bottom
of Hell in the Koran
where the Zaqqūm tree grows
watered by scalding rains
“bearing fruit like devils’ heads”
* * *
In not giving her name
someone has noted at the end
of the transcript that the girl herself
could not or would not recall it
and then describes her as a survivor
* * *
Which of course is from the Latin
meaning to live on
to outlive others
* * *
I would not have used that word
“Terminus” is a nerve-racking documentary poem, a dark testimonial that takes its place in a lineage of poems that tell terrifying historical truths and bring forward otherwise unheard voices. It has an eerie precision—compassionate but slightly removed, empathic but detached enough to present grueling evidence. It is a lyric with an epic heritage—think of Muriel Rukeyser’s groundbreaking book-length poem The Book of the Dead (1938), about mine workers in West Virginia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), which compresses twenty-six volumes of courtroom testimony from the trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg and Jerusalem. Whereas Rukeyser traveled to West Virginia to write her poem (“There are roads to take when you think of your country”), Reznikoff served as a secondary, or secondhand, witness to the grim horrors of the Shoah.
The documentary poem commits itself to testimonials, to history, to what Reznikoff called “recitatives.” Christopher’s poem presents the transcript of an interview between a Red Cross doctor and a twelve-year old Bosnian girl. He took the text from an official Red Cross document and condensed it. His arrangement creates some horrific points of emphasis. As in poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and W. S. Merwin, the lack of punctuation gives “Terminus” an improvisational spoken quality, a feeling of being untethered, almost lifting off the page. It enables a freer associative process than, say, the exact transcript of an interview in prose. But it works in the service of the testimony, an act of witnessing.
A terminus is a final point in time or space, the end of the line, an extremity. There is no going beyond it. The narrator of this poem, a stand-in for the poet, begins with the language of a journalist or history professor presenting evidence. “Here is a piece of required reading / at the end of our century / at the end of a millennium that began with the crusades.” Christopher wrote the poem in 1993 (“1993 may as well be 1943”) and reports from the end of the twentieth century, the century of mass murders, though he also recognizes that we are at the endpoint of a thousand-year history that began with religious wars.
Christopher places the girl at the very heart of his poem. We can’t look away from her; we can’t stop listening to her appalling testimony. She is a real person, not an abstraction of history. She tells what happened not just to her but to her parents and her brothers and her sister-in-law, who had the misfortune to be nursing a baby. By the time of her testimony, the men in her village had all been executed by Serbian militia, whom the poet sarcastically refers to as “men calling themselves soldiers.” The implication is that real soldiers wouldn’t act so dishonorably.
There is a moment when the narrator is so floored by the matter-of-fact way that the girl describes such unspeakable cruelty that he pauses to point out that he is using her actual words:
at which point one of the men
tore the child from her arms
and as if he were “cutting an ear of corn”
(the girl’s words)
lopped off the child’s head
with a hunting knife
There is an awful everyday quality to the monstrous cruelty.
The third stanza breaks off to describe how the girl whispers her story in a dry monotone. There is nothing theatrical or exaggerated about her report. We observe the setting and hear how she turned up frostbitten, “wearing only a soiled slip / her hair yanked out / her teeth broken.” Christopher might have broken his poem off there and left us to contemplate the permanent misery of a Bosnian girl and what was inflicted upon her family.
But in the next stanza the narrator turns to address himself in the second person: “All the history you’ve ever read / tells you this is what men do.” He puts the reader in the position of overhearing his argument, his recognition “of the beast / who is a fixture of human history.” That beast is gendered as male. The narrator explicitly links what is happening in Bosnia in 1993 to what happened in Europe fifty years earlier, and he recalls the concentration camps that he heard about as a boy. Nothing changes, he insists; men continue to dehumanize other people, to wrap their cruelty in national pieties and military titles. There doesn’t seem to be any end to human depravity and cruelty.
And then the story returns to the girl, as it must, and the narrator tells us how she would never escape what happened to her, how she would always be returned to that room, which he compares to “the chamber at the bottom / of Hell in the Koran.” He refers to the Zaqqūm tree of the Qur’an (37:62–68), a cursed tree grown in fire, as if he is reaching for biblical language—“bearing fruit like devils’ heads”—to describe the poisonous fruits of this inhumane and human earthly hell. But then he lowers the level of the language a notch. The girl won’t give her name to the interviewer, he tells us, and points to a note by someone in the Red Cross who describes the girl as a “survivor.”
Christopher takes an extra moment at the end of “Terminus” to provide the etymology of the word survivor, which he sets off as a stanza and purposely divides into three lines, the first dry and explanatory (“Which of course is from the Latin”), the next two poignant (“meaning to live on / to outlive others”). He concludes with a nearly deadpan last line, a sentence and stanza unto itself: “I would not have used that word.” There really is no language to describe what this nameless Muslim girl in Bosnia has gone through, the sheer insanity of what was done to her. But the word “survivor” seems completely inadequate to define the human being at the heart of “Terminus.”
Marie Howe
* * *
“What the Living Do”
(1994)
Marie Howe’s younger brother John died from AIDS-related complications in 1989. He was twenty-eight
years old. The two of them had always been close (she was the second oldest and he was the second youngest in a family of nine children), and he had been her dear friend and confidant ever since he was a boy. They wrote constantly to each other—sometimes two letters a week—and she showed him all her work. She was shattered by his death. It took her a few years to figure out how to write “What the Living Do,” a poem in the form of a letter to him. I first read it in a magazine in 1994, and the way she has given voice to loss has stayed with me for the past twenty-five years.
What the Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there,
and the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
* * *
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
* * *
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
* * *
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
* * *
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
* * *
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
* * *
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
* * *
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Howe’s grief was unlocked when she stopped trying to write a traditional elegy for her brother and decided to write him a letter instead. She felt that she was writing a real letter to a true friend, and the direct address released her. She was consoling herself by sending something to him as if he could receive it, as if he could still hear her talking to him about everyday life. She imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, which creates the illusion of a continuing conversation, as if the poet can still talk to her brother because he is alive inside of her. But now it is a one-sided conversation, and she must comfort herself. And, unlike an actual letter, this one is not entirely meant for its designated recipient, who is beyond reading. By figuring that letter as a poem, by shaping it into long-lined, deep-breathing couplets, she also intends it as something for us, her readers, to experience and overhear.
Howe is thus extending a tradition that began with Horace’s Epistles (20–14 BCE), though she updates Horace’s use of the imaginary letter to reflect on a larger moral or philosophical subject. Her letter is more akin to those of Richard Hugo, who brought the form closer to real letters in his book 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977). And yet we never mistake the letter poem for an actual letter, which is typically intended for only one reader. Whether the letter addressed to someone who is dead is really intended for that reader is questionable. Such a letter is instead a fantasy of connection, a mode of self-consolation, a way of talking to oneself—and others.
Howe’s epistolary lyric is an elegiac poem of loss that is also about the dailiness of life. Notice what she decides to confide to her dead brother—and what she doesn’t tell him. This is a personal poem but not a confessional one. For example, she doesn’t fill him in on what has happened to their large family over the past few years. She doesn’t confess any dark secrets, as might happen in a poem by Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Instead, she tells him about ordinary mishaps, the everyday, the mundane, and makes that the thematic through line of the poem.
Howe relies on the unrhymed couplet, an elemental stanzaic unit. Whereas William Meredith strongly depended on closed couplets to create an epigrammatic sense of closure at the beginning of his poem “Parents,” Howe uses her first four stanzas to open up the couplet and propel the poem forward from one line and stanza to another. There is thus an emphatic change when we come to two closed, self-contained couplets:
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
* * *
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
The closed couplet emphasizes the short declarative sentences: “This is it. / . . . What you called that yearning.” So too the poet puts considerable pressure on the enjambment: “We want / whoever to call . . .” Note how she threads the words together with the letter w and thus repeatedly opens our mouths in a small, tight circle: “What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want / whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more . . .” She repeats the word “more” three times. The yearning or desire for love, for more life, seems to define life itself.
Howe has made the long line one of her signatures. This expansive unit pushes past the five-beat iambic pentameter line, energizing her to put things into her poems rather than take them out. Like the Whitmanesque poets Muriel Rukeyser, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Etheridge Knight, and C. K. Williams, she shapes long lines that incline toward prose without ever turning into a prose poem. That’s because each set of lines has a distinctive rhythm and maintains a kind of lyric integrity as a unit of meaning, a measure of attention.
The ten-syllable or blank-verse line has provided a kind of norm in English-language poetry. Both Wordsworth and Frost, for example, perceived that the blank-verse line could give the sensation of actual speech, of a person engaging others. The poet Allen Grossman argued that the line of more than ten syllables consequently gives a feeling of going beyond the parameters of oral utterance, or over them, beyond speech itself. The lines widen the space for reverie. “The speaker in the poem bleeds outward as in trance of sleep toward other states of himself,” Grossman says. This line also radiates an oracular feeling, which is why it has so often been the line of prophetic texts, visionary poetry.
This line of argument applies to Howe’s poem because its ordinary details take on a kind of sacred aura. Her speaker points out, for example, how “the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through / the open living-room windows . . .” She is consecrating what she would later use as the title of a book: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008). There’s a bit of poetic magic in the way this conversational poem reaches beyond speech and hits a different register, a higher visionary note. The poem lands on vulnerable, sacramental moments that seem to exist almost outside of time. Notice the argumentative turn on the word “But”:
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
* * *
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless . . .
Howe is describing an intense revelatory moment, a “moment of being,” to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase. It’s no accident that the speaker becomes dumbfounded and astounded at the end of the poem. It’s only when she sees herself in reflection that she is gripped by a sense of self-care, of being alive, out in the open, exposed. She is robbed of speech and therefore concludes with a simple living pronouncement: “I am living. I remember you.”
Howe has explained in intervi
ews how her brother’s death changed her:
After John died, the world became very clear—as if a window had broken—the world itself became very dear. It was the place John had lived, and as long as I still walked around I could catch glimpses of him. But more than that, when John died I felt as if I had finally entered the larger community of humans. Now I knew unbearable grief, and I was like other people in this world who had known this.
Howe brings her recognition of a shared community of grief to the poem, which is pierced by a sense of mortal loss. Many people have testified to losing their way after someone they love has died. They are knocked so far back that they need to figure out how to live again. No one else can do it for them, either. And that’s precisely how this elegy becomes a poem about carrying on, about going forward and living in the aftermath of grievous loss. The main lesson of the poem is a simple declarative sentence: “This is what the living do.” It’s almost an instruction manual too, on self-cherishing: This is what the living must do. This is it. That yearning.
Dunya Mikhail
* * *
“The War Works Hard”
(1994)
Dunya Mikhail fled Iraq in 1996. She left because Saddam Hussein’s government had questioned her. She was facing increasing threats and harassment from the Iraqi authorities for her writings after the First Gulf War, which culminated in her verse memoir Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. She writes about war as a woman, mother, wife, and friend.
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