I guess one of the other kinds of silence
are ways in which fact finally resists transformation.
And I read in a newspaper a while ago,
I'm sure you all heard about it, about a man in San Francisco
who offered a whole lot of money for proof
that the Holocaust really occurred, and really believes
it.
It frightened me enormously because, in fact,
if the photographs didn't exist, there'd been--
apparently memory was no longer considered proof.
And history was no longer considered
a valid vehicle for a proof.
And so if we didn't have the photographs,
it would have in fact never occurred,
which really terrified me.
So I wrote this poem titled "History."
And there are other events in it that
actually occurred that I found in a newspaper account
in Italy.
"History."
"Into whose ear the deeds are spoken.
The only listener.
So I believed he would remember everything,
the murmuring trees, the sunshine's zealotry,
its deep unevenness.
For history is the opposite of the eye for whom,
for instance, six million bodies in portions of hundreds
and the flowerpots broken by a sudden wind
stand as equivalent.
What more is there in fact?
"I'll give $10,000 to the man who proves the Holocaust really
occurred," said the exhausted solitude
in San Francisco in 1980.
Far in the woods in a faded photograph in 1942
the man with his own genitalia in his mouth
and hundreds of slow holes a pitchfork has opened
over his face grows beautiful.
The ferns and deep wood lilies catch the eye.
Three men in ragged uniforms with guns
keep laughing nervously.
They share the day with him.
A bluebird sings.
The feathers of the shade touch every inch of skin--
the hand holding down the delicate gun, the hands
holding down the delicate hips.
And the sky is visible between the men,
between the trees, a blue spirit enveloping anything.
Late in the story, in Northern Italy,
a man cuts down some trees for winter fuel.
We read this in the evening news.
Watching the fire burn late one night,
watching it change and change, a hand grenade,
lodged in the pulp the young tree grew around,
explodes, blinding the man, killing his wife.
Now who will tell the children fairy-tales?
The ones where simple crumbs over the forest floor
endure to help us home?