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  • Museum Footage, 1945, and: Divers on Film
  • Marianne Boruch (bio)

Museum Footage, 1945

After Chechnya, after Stalin's Bykivnia,after ISIS and Boko Haram and the Killing Fields.After Tikrit, Wounded Knee, the greatslave uprisings in the South put down relentless.After the bile keeps coming, words spewed at a podium,any monster in a drive-by with a spray can—After, and after how

in that film they keep draggingbody after body skin deep, bone rag, limp-headed,to toss them doggedly let's-get-this-done intoa pit the size of an Olympic pool,the sort lifeguards scanwith only zoned-out attention sinceeveryone in a place like that swims well enough.

After all, they did swim. It's likeswimming, pitched midair up, arms and legsflung out to abandon, coming down coming downto others piled high who sleep—how dare to call it sleep—these deathsat last a real death. How dare we after,dazed on a bench to watch this.

The unspeakable redundance. British soldiersforce it at gunpoint, thosedraggers and hurlers in a kind of uniform too,Bergen-Belsen I think, stoutgrim women mostly, jackets and skirts and little scarvesknotted vaguely natty, wildly bedraggled, holding [End Page 82] a foot or a hand to haphazard the deadacross the weedy lot and notthe next world, just this vast hole dug by—

Always and after, horror has a stand-stillfalling forever about it. Wordless patchy film,this museum, next century, this humanrepeatedly who we are.

By then a snakereels up, stops, ready to springfrom a freezing calm. That's the strickenstabbing question ever after, isn't it?Which of us, and in us.

I hate even to imagine them. All in all,a decent job in wartime, surelythose guards said at first, the womenever after on screenlimping, thrust forward becauseof their load. We lucky things, they no doubt

flattered each other, suchbread, good butter, roast rabbit, goose liver—our kitchen and mess separatefrom the rabble. And theirricocheted spite at somestraight-from-cities-by-train, what finewoolen coats, ties, perfectgabardine dresses. …Hope, a temporarynot-so-bad, each seaside, to mountain airsuitcase in hand.

No, a grip in hand. And notbecause we called things differently then.All doom clicks the sameshut, bone-knuckled. After thathow in the bloodied living hell to carry it. [End Page 83]

Divers on Film

In real life they mainlydanger and disappear, no big dealstanding poisedover the blue drop, arms out high atworld's edge, holding back—not to tempt the dark nothing, stilla kind of surrender thatfive, six seconds the human heartcompacted, then down

of course, straight down

given gravity's deathlessinsistence. Yet at poolside a cameraaimed under that blueexactly where the forever-afteraftermaths and breaks,

body a thing

shot, split-second rushto the bottom soslow-mo now, on film. Vast foamingfills the screen at the wall

instant for replay the white messof our going gone waywardrising rivulets of cloud—

I swear a cloud—

as body arrows up, unarms,escapes the fire it makesof water each time, a cold searingin plain sight,

the smoke of us, anylove and fear once. [End Page 84]

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch's ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, cited as a "most loved book of 2016" by the New Yorker, was published by Copper Canyon Press, which also brought out her Cadaver, Speak and The Book of Hours (a Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award winner). Her prose includes three essay collections, including the recent The Little Death of Self in Michigan's Poets on Poetry series, and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana). A former Guggenheim, NEA, and Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow, she teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College

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