[APPLAUSE]
I want to give you the poem, the code poem of the book ourselves
or nothing.
It's a poem, which was written to Terrence Des
Pres, who is the author of a book called The Survivor--
An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps.
It was published by Oxford in 1976.
Terrence lives in a huge wooden farmhouse in upstate New York,
but he only lives in two of the rooms
because he can't afford to heat the whole thing.
In order to do his book, he spent five years
reading the camp literature.
The camp literature are all novels, diaries, journals,
letters, anything produced by a man
or woman or child who survived the death camps under Hitler,
or who survived the camps, the labor camps under Stalin.
He studied these camps together; the study
was to determine what is this survivor sole.
And what is it that moves some men and women to obsessively
relive the most horrible experience of their past
in order to bear witness to it.
And halfway through doing the research,
he confronted himself and felt that he
had to either commit suicide or complete the work very well;
and fortunately, he did complete it.
There are some things in this poem, which you will hear once
moving through the, poem and I will just
tell you what they are since some of them
might be unfamiliar.
I addressed him at the house and then you
will hear an "Anna" mentioned, she is my paternal grandmother.
And then Theresienstadt, this was a transit camp mostly
for children in Czechoslovakia, near the village of Terezin,
it was where children waited to be taken to death camps.
He is quoted, "every once in a while" very briefly
through the poem, and then I also
quote, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, which most of you
are familiar with.
Then the poem, there is a little bit
of a wandering in the reverie to Vietnam,
Ao Dai are the tunics and pants worn by women of Vietnam.
So you will know when you hear that word, that's where you
are, it goes then to Salvador.
And there is a line in French near the end.
ici repose un dèportè inconnu
This is here lies the unknown deported.
That line is engraved on a slab of stone
near the sand behind Notre-Dame in Paris
in the memorial to the 200,000 French deportees who
died in the camps.
Ourselves or nothing, for Terrence Des Pres.
After seven years, and as the wine leaves
and black trunks of maples wait beyond the window,
I think of you.
North, in those few lighted rooms
of that ruined house, a candle in each open pane of breath.
The absence of anyone snow in a hurry to Earth.
My fingernails pressing half moons into the sill
as I watched you pouring three, then four fingers of scotch
over ice.
The chill in your throat like a small blue bone
those years of your work on the Holocaust.
You had to walk off the darkness,
miles of winter riverfront, windows
the eyes in skulls along the river
gratings in the streets over jeweled human sewage,
your breath hanging about your face like tobacco.
I was with you even then.
Your face, the face of a clock as you
swept through the memoirs of men and women
who would not give up.
In the short light of December's, you
took suppers of whole white hens and pans of broth
in a city of liquor bottles and light.
Go, after that, which is lost.
And all the mass graves of the centuries dead
will open into your early waking hours.
Belsen, Dachau, Saigon, Phnom Penh
And the one meaning bridge of Ravens,
Sao Paulo, Armagh, Calcutta, Salvador; although these
are not the same.
You wrote two of Theresientadt that word that
ran screaming into my girlhood lifting its gray wool dress.
The smoke in its violent plumes and feathers,
the dark wormy heart of the human desire to die.
In Prague, Anna told me, "There was bread, stubborn potatoes
and fish, armies and the women who lie down with them,
eggs perhaps, but never meat; never meat, but the dead."
In Theresienstadt, she said, "There was only
the dying; never bread, potatoes, fish or women,
they were all as yet girls then".
Vast numbers of men and women died, you wrote,
because they did not have time - the blessing of sheer time
to recover.
Your ration of time was smaller than a tin spoon of winter,
piano notes one at a time from the roof to the gutter
- I am only imagining this.
As I had not yet entered your life,
like the dark fact of a gun on your pillow,
or Anna Akhmatova's Requiem; and its final.
I can when the faceless woman before her asked, "Can you
describe this?"
I was not yet in your life when you
term the bullet toward the empty hole in yourself
and whispered, "Finish this or die."
But you lived in what you wrote, "Became the survivor
that act of contrition or despair".
They turn to face the worst, straight on,
without sentiment or hope, simply to keep watch over life.
Now, as you sleep face down on your papers,
the book pages turning of themselves
in your invisible breath.
I climb the stairs of that house, fragile with age
and the dry fear of burning, and I
touch the needle to music to wake you.
The snow long passed falling something by Vivaldi or Brahms.
I have come from our cacophonous ordinary lives
where I stood at the sink last summer, scrubbing mud
from potatoes, listening to the supper
fish in the skillet, my eyes on the narrowed streets of rain
through the windows.
As I thought of the long war, that misted country
turned to the moon's surface gray and ring
warmed with ridges of light.
The women in their silk ao dais along the river.
Those flowers under fire roll at night
in the desperate arms of American men.
Once I walked your rooms with my night dress
opened, a cigarette from my lips to the darkness
and back, as you worked at times through to the morning,
always on my waking, you were gone.
The blue holes of your path through snow
to the road, your face still haggard in the White mirror.
The pained note where 10 times you had written the word
recalcitrance, and once, you will
die and live under the name of someone who has actually died.
I think of that night in the Tropic hotel, the man who
danced with a tray over his head and offered us free
because we were socialistas; not only that he sang,
but young and pretty.
Later as I lay on a cot in the heat,
my friend was able to reach for the guns
and load them clicking in the moonlight with only
the barest of sounds.
He had heard them before me moving among the poems we
were going to die there.
I remember the moon notching its way through the poems
and the calm sense that game for me.
At the end of my life, in that moment, the woman beside me
became my sister.
Her hand cupping her mouth, the blood that
would later spill from her face if what we believed
were the truth.
Her blood would crawl black and belly down
onto a balcony of hands and flashlights, cameras, flowers,
propaganda.
Her name was Renee.
And without knowing her, you wrote all things,
human take time.
Time, which the damned never have.
Time for life to repair, at least the worst of its wounds.
It took time to wake, time for horror to incite revolt.
Time for the recovery of lucidity and will.
In the late afternoons, you returned.
The long teeth shining from the eaves,
a clink in the wood half burnt and as you touched it alive,
ici repose un dèportè inconnu.
In the mass graves, a woman's hand
caged in the ribs of her child.
A single stone in Spain beneath olives.
In Germany, the silent windy fields in the Soviet Union
where the snow is scarred with wire.
In Salvador, where the blood will never soak into the ground
everywhere and always go after that, which is lost.
There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter.
And behind it, we hover in a calm,
protected world, like netted fish,
exactly, like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end of the world
and the choice is ourselves or nothing.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
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Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Do you have questions?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Do I have some minutes?
I'd like to know if you have any questions.
I wasn't able to be here this afternoon for that,
and they can be of poetics or politics, or both, or Central
America, or whatever you like.
Does anyone curious about anything particular?