An Old Story
- An Old Story
The trouble was, Luise said,he was strikingly Jewish-looking … loud …I stumbled on this in a book … My grandfatherwaving his arms and saying—what?—on the train to Switzerland. His arrestat Singen. My grandmother pale with terror.But I see her faking smiles and warmthin her light blue eyes to slip by guards,crawling that night across the border,while he, whom she’d never see again,went east. Luise Meier was the oneshe blamed … Or so it says.
Again and again, this book, these fragments,sieved for gold. Luise Meier,saving almost thirty Jews,my grandfather not betraying his helpers.But what was said on the train? What’s lostto silence, in bitter or wishful retelling?I think of cooling lovers, the scornwith which they wrench themselves apart,how quickly we transform our saviors,loved ones, lost ones into demons,or into icons, trapped foreverin their final, terrible moments.
Ditch-dirt, ash, a plume of smoke,this train is roaring through my blood,crammed with shattered lives, sometimesdistant, barely heard, sometimesscreeching closer. I hold on tightto this quiet room, the lamps, the books,the sleeping cats, and through the windowthe large moon, still there, still there. [End Page 62]
Charlotte Innes’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Rattle, The Raintown Review (including the recent 2015 anthology, The Best of the Raintown Review), and other magazines. Some poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Spiritual Writing for 2006 (Houghton Mifflin) and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books 2015), amongst others. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Licking the Serpent (2011) and Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Currently, she teaches and tutors students in English and creative writing at schools in and around Los Angeles. Her first book, Descanso Drive, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2017.
