I'm just going to read three more poems.
The next one has a rather ghoulish sort of detail
that perhaps needs a little bit of explanation.
In the 19th century, the British excavated
most of the mummies that were entombed in Egypt
in the Valley of the Kings.
And you would think they would have ended up in museums,
but in fact, most of those mummies
were sold to a company in Liverpool that made fertilizer.
And it was a sales gimmick that John Lennon's grandmother's
yard had particles of ground up mummies.
And that's not one of the main things in the poem,
though I think you'll understand where it's going.
The title of the poem is, "Xerox of a Photograph
of Bergen-Belsen."
Bergen-Belsen was one of the concentration camps.
For Henry Johnson.
"Thereafter his lecture on graves, yet these
are not graves.
His lecture on well-organized hell, but this is neither hell,
nor organized even to form discernible shapes.
A handout, we reconstruct slowly,
roil of body on stacked body, and heads
oddly floating to a surface caught mid-scream and never
like Orpheus.
The classrooms waxed floor glare, this ink, and image,
recollection of the cameras remembering abstract eye.
But not I, nor the echoing neural memory of I,
nor the memory of the thumb of George A. Rogers, Magnum
Photographers Incorporated, pressing down the button
to release the lens to 16/100ths of a second's glimpse of light.
This room, midsummer sun on rows of desks,
the lake beyond, and darkening sky.
Event and evasion, end-link in the causal chain, already
the linkage mere and neat, mere and neat.
Bronze coins of the realm's most distant provinces,
raised profiles of Trajan, or Alexander,
distorted to less than caricature.
150,000 mummies from the valleys near Luxor, human, cat, snake,
and ibis, stacked on Nile docks, and loaded on clippers,
bound for Liverpool and ground there for fertilizer, spices,
aphrodisiacs for Chinese coolies laying track in California
for the driving of the Golden Stake.
A warehouse of hair, a warehouse of shoes,
the hotel terminus, Lyon.
A German military doctor injecting Jean Moulin with
methamphetamine to wake him for his final beating,
personally administered by Obersturmführer and former
seminarian Klaus Barbie, end link.
The stifling room, the sister of Anne Frank, end link.
Limbs akimbo, patternless, water scrolls in rain,
end link, near and neat.
A warehouse of scarves, of ladies underthings, the window
blistering with rain, the big drops' cough and hiss,
and gazes scarcely pausing on these shades, these pages."