Traces of Life

Shell Shock

—for Samuel Menashe, World War ii soldier and poet

I read in the newspaper about a poet who returned from World War ii, amazed to hear people talk about what they might do next summer, or the year after next year, years of plans they were making, innocent of the sheer impossibility of a belief in continuity. On the December morning of the Battle of the Bulge, he was one of a company of one hundred and ninety-seven men.

By evening, twenty-nine remained. I think these days about shellshock, its detonative power to explode the supermarket’s neon-bright oranges at the precise moment we lean over them, hand outstretched, or a belief that the breath I take, right now, is all there is, all there can be.

Yet the poet insisted in the story, “Don’t make me grim,” and, to me, he wasn’t, appearing, instead, to bear within himself one moment, untouched by time, rounded, whole, translucent with whatever light there was on that December morning when he and all his men were still alive.

Monk’s House

—after a visit to the house of Virginia Woolf

Now that the room’s cleared of strangers, I’ll read my day’s   mail and drink tea before the fire, but first I’ll record in my journal the brazen   remarks I heard

from today’s tourists—complaints about my so-called   predilection for pea-green wall paint, the lowness of the ceilings, the   suspicion of damp.

And where did she sleep? And with whom did she sleep? I’ve watched visitors to my house year after year trying to   find in what

I left behind some trace of the life I lived, but not content   with a trace, they want to see through the armchairs and bookcases into   my soul.

I felt almost sorry for a woman who stared at the   mantelpiece. I knew she was wondering what it would be like to write   my final note to Leonard

and leave it propped on the mantel for him to find, too late,   that morning. I saw her walking toward the river, and I knew she was   trying to know

what it was like for me to fill my pockets with stones and   step into the river Ouse and walk in and in and in, but she will never   know.

I shooed her off to Charleston to let her bask in the   afternoon sun breaking through clouds in Vanessa’s garden fat with flowers and paintings of   flowers.

I cannot grant her the sight she wants. Still she’s stubborn.   I see her glancing back along the dirt track leading from Monk’s House to   Charleston.

She shades her hand against the sun, but I am too far away   for her to see.

Spring in Cornwall

Everywhere in Cornwall, photos of shipwrecks abound: schooners smashed into cliffs, the timber of hulls littered about the shoreline or another ship listing in flat water as if a breeze might come along and right everything.

The weather’s “unstable” as the English like to say, lovely one moment, the next a chill rain drifts across Falmouth Harbor like a line of magnetized filings in a child’s game and umbrellas sprout like mushrooms.

The stout ferry I ride ploughs, like a toy boat, through waves on my way toward the pastel-painted houses of St. Mawes where once again the sun breaks out across the town’s pink and yellow and azure façades.

Wherever I am in England I like to touch the water, the only highway out of town for my ancestors, I think, and wading into the sea I reenact the push and pull of immigration, the desire to leave, the longing to stay.

These Isles, land of contrasts, white sand, gnarly rocks, black sea, blue sea, clouds and sun, emotional reserve and easy chat, my blood link both loose and strong and I walk into the ocean only so far before returning to shore.