Jorie GrahamSoldatenfriedhof
(German Cemetery, La Cambe, Normandy, 2003,Computer Terminal)
"To find a fallen person," it says, "push green key." Fill in name, last name, first name, I put in Klein. 210 Kleins in the Soldatenfriedhof. I scroll. Klein stays the same. The first name changes, rank, row, plot. No. The graveyard changes too. At 88 Klein's in Colleville (U.S. graveyard). At 93 he's in the British one (Bayeux). Have you found your fallen person says the program when I go back to the home page. No slot for nationality. None for religion. Just date of birth. Then rank, row, plot, and field come forth. I'm staring at the soundless screen. Keys very large for easy use. Back through the doorway there's the field. 21,222 German soldiers. Some named, some not. Inside the office now a wide face looking up. When is the last time a new man was found, I ask. Here it is full, he says, people now go to Saint Andre. So there are no new bodies being found? Oh no. No, no. Just last month eight-- here look, pulling a red file from a stack. Look--and it's open--here, you'll see. A name, a question mark, a print of teeth of which two (lost after death) marked "lost after death." A plastic baggie holds an oval metal tag, almost illegible, now placed into my hand. The other baggie he snaps open: here: a button: we mostly tell them from the buttons: this was a paratrooper: you can see from the size, the color of the casing. The sleeve of something other than time, I think, slides open to reveal, nested, as in a pod, this seed, hard, dark, how does he make out its identity--a paratrooper--a German one--each people's buttons different--if it's a German, we get called--if he is ours we begin work--whatever clothing still exists--part of a boot, a lace, can get you back the person--a metal clip--the stitching of a kind of cloth. There were so many more kinds of fiber then. Then as much soil as we can get--bone-fragments when there are-- how fast flesh turns to soil again--that is why clothing is so good. Where there are teeth too it is good-- we will be able to notify the family. There is great peace in knowing your person is found. Mostly in Spring when the land is plowed. Sometimes when they widen roads. Many were put in with the apple trees. One feels, from the way they are placed, the burying was filled with kindness. I don't really know why, but it is so. I turn the oval in my hand. Soil on it still, inside the chiseled number- group, deeper in the 3's and 8's, so that it's harder to make out the whole. The boy is 17 he says. What if he hadn't been found. What if he is now found. What does he re-enter. Champigny Saint Andre will receive some earth, jaw, teeth, buttons, dogtag, an insignia, hair, bones of most of one right hand. When more than one have been found together, the official of the graves registration department --this man with soft large hands holding the folder out-- portions out enough human remains to make up as many people as possible. The possible person: a tooth is enough. Anything will do really, he says looking up, almost inaudibly. With whom is he pleading. Behind him now the field where in '47 American bodies, and parts-of, put here temporarily, were dug up and moved for the last time to their final resting place at the American Normandy War Memorial-- and these available German parts and wholes pulled from their holding grounds and placed in openings Americans released. Forgive me says the man still in his seat, I have been rude, I did not mean (gets up) my name is ______, here is my card. May I hold the button a moment longer? You from under the apple orchard, you still not found in my field and the mole hacking through, and the rabbits at dawn eating, and the bird I cannot identify, you, meaninglessness, speak out--what do you hate--what do you hate--
Physician
My person is sick. It trembles. They have looked everywhere in my body for a cause, oh my body is brilliant. Forgive my brilliant body, dear gods, whatever hallway you have strayed down--maybe even answering a house call? Maybe finding your way out? I agree the layout is growing increasingly complicated. Not one exit is marked. It must feel to you like a horrible labyrinth, this history of ours. No opening. And all our walls! Everywhere crammed full of the crushed and confused and still-milling numberless angels. Everywhere in the solids of our world them rushing towards each other. As there is nowhere else for them to rush towards. Even in my room, in my walls, right there, deep inside them, something filled with greatest passion, thickening folds of it, is personally embracing a void. My person, ah, America, sinks into its bed. Into the brooding. All day long reads only the Physicians' Desk Reference. To find out what is wrong. Has all the symptoms. Is not mad. Wants to tell you, read carefully, you will find you have them too. This takes a while, but after a while, you will find yourself shuddering into your diagnosis. It's like having inside you numberless confused angels. At evening my person looks briefly out of the upstairs window, just before the light goes, over the stony valley, where the hawk always sweeps round the left end of the field. That is YOUR field my person says under its breath, and the hawk knows it, and the disease knows it, and the summer which is very far away and which might never come back knows it, even the steps out the front door which might never again give of their service to my person know it. Your field, yours, it says although this time only with its eyes, as the room stuffed full of angels is best kept silent. My person loves history. It loves the great battles which make it weep as it lies in bed remembering. It wants to remember all of them. What did we look like then? The bugle boy enters into the room, shyness in him, then the note is sounded. A crowd of horses tries to turn around in the small room--the bed in their way--the nightlights confusing. Their riders have a hard time holding. Where the hell are they? IN MY BODY'S HEART. Formation for battle, first assault--it is not easy in a small space such as a mind or a bedroom. Memory is a much larger space of course but these armies are not in there, they are in here. Will you not help me at least with this, you powers. The Pythian Goddess once sat here, fumes rising from her into the early dawn. My person had fallen into a moment's rest so was sleeping and missed her. So how do I know this? At any rate it is the bloody shiny campaigns I need to watch--one by one, in greatest detail-- run through their course, over all the continents, through every one of the centuries. There was a time when there were no centuries. It is what began with them my person needs to review. There is not much time and it needs to do it all. The sickness: new doctors come every day, I send them away. I read the desk reference. I am on page 293. You can see it open here, and all the underlining. The disease is not as bad as the remedies. I try them all. I will try them all till it is over. How do I tell my person it is not my body that is ill. Not my body, not me, that is right. To be sure, there is terminal personal illness, but this is not personal, there is no longer personal illness. No. It is something else. Outside: seasons, what is left of them, a household, what is said and done, ashes cleaned up again, a new fire set, bread, promises called-out from one room to another, solid floors, and then motion, motion all day long, its miraculous invisible millions of paths all over everything. That is that says my body. Then there's this--my telling to you, the me in me, the multiplication of persons, out of control.... What will my body do when the book is all read. It will have had them all, the possible illnesses. It will ask for others. The unknown ones. That their symptoms be listed and brought to it. It trembles. It is trembling. It will look back on even this with a memory of devastating joy.
Passenger
Where are you from. I have never been there. Why did you leave. Excuse me. I cannot hear you. Because of the partition. Is there some way you could lower the partition. Where is your country. How many family did you leave behind. Behind--is that what you would call your country. Was it worth it. I can't imagine what you have seen. Your desert your mountains your endless blue rivers. Blue rivers. Your dirt cities. Your, your--oh what is it, I have seen it in pictures, or things like it. But your country. Your tiny piece of country. Do you regret. I always ask you this. You keep on changing there in the front seat driving me to my destination. The destination changes. But the movement is the same. You are making [not enough] money. Not enough. You are on the phone, or your country's radio is blasting. Over your new country your old country's radio. Or you are stoned. Or you are very angry. Scores fly through the small space between us. Someone is wrong. That is one firm truth. But you see I cannot do any right thing here any longer. I can think and out-think and so on. But we're at the gates of Judgment and you are still driving I am still the passenger. We could change places. You see of course it's only on this page we can do that. I will be the one who is sleeping when I as a passenger arrive at the stand and knock at the front window, or simply open the back door. Wake up. I will be the one abruptly awakened. I will be sorry to awaken you. I will say you didn't wake me I wasn't sleeping. I will say o.k. You will say I was just thinking. I will say of what. We are now pulling away from the curb. I will say I was thinking of my country. I count out my money again. I use this word enough. We are approaching the destination. I am afraid. I am afraid I will not be able to handle your suffering. But that is a lie. You are so far away now from your country--you have had to give up something so great [God only knows what][I don't know what] for money, I mean let's face it, for money to send home, yes, and then to get all the stuff--not very much it is true but they make you feel it is always almost enough. Also you are scared [therefore the flags on your windows][one in the car itself]. Scared they will say you did IT. Or could have. I am also scared. Am I driving now? It is not clear here. There were supposed to be instructions. Stage directions. Or signs from the deities, but they have moved on. There must be an other place I think sometimes. For them to have moved on to. The Apocalypse? That is a common destination spot for many human minds now. The rapid swallowing of all we made. The bird's eye view we're so in love with. Ah. Is this town empty? We keep on driving. You, you who have come here abandoning what you should not have abandoned (we both know this), what cordless thing thundering with gold were you imagining when you boarded your bus away fast, lake in the distance? The heroic wanderings of your own past people, what have they come down to here, you glowingly immersed in cablight, in the jagged sums you take home to make ends meet. In the humming exchange rates for what you send home. Do you love them still? Here I see your eyes in the rear view. Ah. How many names can you name. Of people who are true Americans. The flags plastered on this vehicle block my view everywhere. How many will cover for you. How many names have you changed. Have you attended to your outfit. Do you sing it well, the god-sanctioned anthem. Are you fluent in this one-god's country. I know your country also has one god but read the fine print he is not the same as ours. "Ours." How does one peel this sticky nationhood off. The vehicle keeps moving I can only be its good passenger. You shut your eyes. You slumber and watch the suburbs go by. You tilt your glance to an aesthetic point of view. You shepherd all the interesting details. You "learn" how "others" live. Ah. End of the Republic. How your outskirts flow by on this way away from you. Your poor trapped immigrant driving your un- imaginable sums around in his heart. Your balance sheet the road to him. His balance sheet enough to make you fear if you still fear. Goodbye. Fearlessness of the American. How you are hated. Everywhere. Goodbye.
Jorie Graham is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. These poems are forthcoming this fall in her newest book Overlord (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2004).
