From the Fire Hills

Before the Bombing

65 BEFORE THE BOMBING Before the bombing, there were photographs of bombing, holes blown through the immaculate white frames in textbooks, where words gathered in the inevitable euphemisms and epitaphs, which are the same. Yet, to behold the planes in cursive encore must have meant the end to rationing, tautologies of newsreels, bland beans, blackouts. Understand, the shattered tenements, the dirty infant wail of the many: these are a kind of good— both portentous and capitalized—to sell to the consumers of oblivion. No need to test for dates, who bombed whom. Because when we emerged, at recess, the sun seemed utterly textless. Only prom slogans— Remember Yesterday, The Time of Our Lives— persisted, as if the past were just some neutral state, a Switzerland of the mind. Before the bombing, there were sentences explaining crater, moonscape, a blank where a church once stood, the pretty planter in its place. That’s how I later sensed the past lingering in cobble and vetch— 66 Bologna’s hillsides punctuated still by unexploded mortars, flak and shrapnel— and why some erasures mean the future, while most just mean what came before. ...