No Place, and: The Luxury
Rent from DeepDyve- No Place, and: The Luxury
No Place
We have found the nearest thingto paradise on earth, wrote Elisabeth,Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, whofled her fatherland in 1887 forNueva Germania, a colonyin Paraguay of racially
pure anti-Semitic vegetariansor were they purely Aryanvegetarian anti-Semites?Her husband, the founder, twoyears later killed himselfthe hard way, taking poison.
Everything they planted failedexcept manioc which was only goodfor tapioca and ideology died awayas Guarani Indians and Latinscohabitated with a dozen of the bigotson the hot plains of San Pedro.
Auschwitz’s Angel of Death Mengelecame by much later hiding outafter gassing all my father’s kin.Is this what happens to utopiasfrom the Greek outopos, no place,why must they all evolve from u- to dys-? [End Page 31]
Even in my Jewish atheistic all-organicvegetable garden where wild dillused to outwit the squash bugsand beneficial insects guarded the beansthis year the corn succumbed to earworm.Hard rains hatched battalions of slugs.
The onions rotted, the carrots were raddledwith root maggots, the purple pole beans collapsed.Field mice had a field day, raccoons a coon fest,the deer came in, it was a paradisefor beasts, another earthly day for us.No Paraguayan bliss, no Nazis on the lam.
The Luxury
Right nowat 4 below zero I have the luxuryof not knowing if the six dogs chainedto their ramshackle doghouses are lyingon hay from the old bale I took to their ownerthis morning with the admonition that all dogsconfined out of doors deserve to havedry bedding.
I have the luxuryof not knowing when they were last fedor of not seeing where the five childrensleep or what covers them or how their fatherserving a year in the House of Correctionfor petty larceny and public drunkennessis being corrected. All of us neighborswho have fought with the town for yearsto take action have the luxury. [End Page 32]
We havecalled the police, the selectmen, the state vet,the spca, the Department of Public Health,the Division of Child and Youth Protection Services.The judge, well known to us as a fecklessand pleasant servant of the law soon to retireon a fixed guaranteed income, keepstaking this ancient case under advisement.He too has the luxury of unknowing. [End Page 33]
Maxine Kumin’s seventeenth poetry collection, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2011. Her final poetry collection, And Short the Season, is forthcoming, as is her young adult novel Lizzie! (Seven Stories P). Kumin’s awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former New Hampshire and United States poet laureate, she and her husband live on a farm in the Mink Hills of Warner, New Hampshire.
