Golden Syrup
She sees the label on a shelf in the Stockbridge Country Store and finds the sealed tin. Her hand feels the years change to liquid, so what has been frozen flows through her fingers. Yet she can’t grasp what wells in her and pours over. South Africa is so many years back, and the past spins away like a wheel circling in cold light. “Adrianne,” she says, in the dim swirl of memory, “I found it.” Her daughter smiles at her mother’s pleasure, at her happiness. She sees the years peel back like old shingle weathered by sun and wind, each with its dark- or light-winged narrative that opens with the turn of a lid. I can see how bright her mother’s face is and how muted her voice and I want to listen to each word she speaks, each syllable her lips reach for. I know she has been saving up for this moment, for this burnt field of seconds that have turned golden because, finally, she can be heard.
A Translator in Auschwitz
You were twenty-four, Mala, when the Nazis came for you in Antwerp, Belgium, on the street of yellow stars. It was then your old life ended and you were swept downward by history’s darkest whorl. In the women’s camp at Birkenau, your command of German helped you name the unspoken, and you could sometimes intercede between fellow prisoners and the immense power that held them. And soon, from fire and ash, from blood and darkness, you drew a stunned few whose pain could not be quieted and moved them to temporary refuge: those broken twigs those scorched leaves who only recently had been people. All your life, Mala, you were first to question, first to fight injustice, and you were the first woman to escape from Auschwitz. That you were captured at the Slovak border and brought back to death’s embrace — death that had been promised to every Jew — was not revelation, but destiny. How fitting it was that you slashed your wrists on the path to the gallows and lashed out at the guard who’d cursed you. Your blood on his face, a translation that defies understanding.
A Woman of Earth - for Charlene Dumas
Even now, in this age of philanthropy, she and her sisters eat dirt. They buy dirt at market where meat is blackened by flies and rice, beans, and fruit are only for the rich. For her and her sisters, and for their infants, the yellow clay of Haiti is like mother’s milk (but it is not yet manna from heaven): mixed with shortening and salt and left in the scorch of sun, the cookies they cut from it are almost edible. For her, the cookies are something less than a feast, yet she likes the taste and her baby draws in that bittersweetness: for her and her sisters, a gift of life. Even now, their babies’ mouths pull at their nipples and their own parched lips are dry as dust.
Two Girls Leaping
They have a favorite color — this one: this chlorinated aqua, this womb lunar blackness drawn wholly into the light. The depth of the pool beguiles them, the weight of their own bodies. Mother is not near, so it is easy to jump in, to test themselves against the cold liquid fire of the violently blue water, to attempt flight, hands linked in a joyous failure of suicide. They wear no caps: dark hair spills black puppy tails along their small tanned necks. Time lunges ahead, eternity passes. A hundred leaps cannot tire them. They live to jump: the heart of the water's coolness pulses in them. In what way are they innocent? The fragrance of unawareness stays on them: their fearful certitude about all things perturbs the slow dark pools we swim in. In their nonstop gab, the world's extravagant newness stings and clashes. They are giddy with the ordinary, laugh in its cold blue stranger's face. * Becky is still laughing, gliding like a seal in her favorite aqua water; she is giggling and splashing; but now Mother is here, now Mother pulls her, goose-bumped and dripping, from the ice-blue pool; now Mother slaps her, slaps her again, again slaps her. And Jennifer has seen everything. Watch how carefully she moves, how cautiously she holds her tingling body. "Let's see who can go slower," she says, "Let's see who goes slower." * The pool is empty now, a liquid rectangle. Water has its own life, its own candor. Step back. Take a running start. Now tell me: What is your heart's desire?