USA and BELGIUM (EUROPE)

Photo Credit: Tellis A. Lawson, Jr.

Leek Street

        in Bruges, was a cul-de-sac so narrow
cars never scarred its mossy cobblestones.
Every house had a niche above the door
for a Saint, and a little garden framed by high
brick walls. Carved into the back rampart,
an iron gate opened on the Wool Canal.
        Now and then, a muskrat's head
pearled out of that green velvet, then slipped
back into the water. The Belfry rang a bronze
quiver through the drizzle every quarter.

        Yochemke lived at No. 8. in the only house
with open curtains and no Saint.
He was nine, had a large hole in his tongue
and six numbers tattooed on his arm.
They did this to him when he was a baby, he said,
he couldn't remember if it hurt.
I loved him so much I repeated the numbers
inside his arm every night until I fell asleep:
Yochemke-seven-four-three-two-three-six
        It rained the day he said I could put
my finger through his tongue.
He shut his pale gray eyes, I shut mine,
and he slowly closed his lips around my finger.
Something guilty and deep made me want to cry.

        We were setting muskrat traps by the canal
the first time he said he loved me. I wanted
to play the piano for him, or have curly hair
and be beautiful, I was so happy.
        The muskrats were for his father
who made collars and muffs out of them
to sell at the Fish Market. He always came
back with something for Yochemke. Once,
it was a glass marble with a heart of green,
blue and gold. When Yochemke gave it to me,
we were sitting by the canal stirring the algae
with willow sticks. His father had told him
the heart of the marble was what the world
looked like before the Germans.

        That night, we climbed the Belfry tower
to make the bronze bell ring with the marble.
Up there, looking down at the brown roofs
and fields of the world, we wanted to change it back
to how it was, make it look like the marble again.
        We'd set traps for the Germans, poke
holes in their tongues, hurl their bodies in the canal,
and all the muskrats of Bruges would feed on them,
fatten, we'd trap them, and ñ
        I'll buy you a piano, said Yochemke,
        we'll be the richest muff makers in Belgium.
Then, with our marble, we tapped the bell
as hard as we could and listened to its small sound
float out over the canals.

The Worlds in this World
This is the world to love. There is no other.
Stephen Dobyns

Doors were left open in heaven again:
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
its last angles caught in sopped
newspaper wings and billowing plastic --
all this in one American street.
        Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide
recedes, incense is lit, an infant
sucks from a nipple, a grenade
shrieks, a man buys his first cane.
        Think of it: the worlds in this world.


        Yesterday, while a Chinese woman took
hours to sew seven silk stitches into a tapestry
started generations ago, guards took only
seconds to mop up a cannibal's brain from the floor
of a Wisconsin jail, while the man who bashed
the killer's head found no place to hide,
and sat sobbing for his mother in a shower stall --
the worlds in this world.

        Or say, one year --say 1916:
while my grandfather, a prisoner of war
in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned
booties for his wife with the skin of a dead
dog found in a trench; shrapnel slit
Apollinaire's skull, Jesuits brandished
crucifixes in Ouagadougou, and the Parthenon
was already in ruins.
        That year, thousands and thousands of Jews
from the Holocaust were already --were
still --busy living their lives;
while gnawed by self-doubt, Rilke couldn't
write a line for weeks in Vienna's Victorgasse,
and fishermen drowned off Finnish coasts,
and lovers kissed for the very first time,
while in Kashmir an old woman fell asleep,
her cheek on her good husband's belly.

        And all along that year the winds
kept blowing as they do today, above oceans
and steeples, and this one speck of dust
was lifted from somewhere to land exactly
here, on my desk, and will lift again --into
the worlds in this world.

        Say now, at this instant:
one thornless rose opens in a blue jar above
that speck, but you --reading this --know
nothing of how it came to flower here, and I
nothing of who bred it, or where, nothing
of my son and daughter's fate, of what grows
in your garden or behind the walls of your chest:
is it longing? Fear? Will it matter?

Listen to that wind, listen to it ranting
        The doors of heaven never close,
            that's the Curse, that's the Miracle.

The Feather at Breendonck

        I am praying again, God --pale God --
here, between white sky and snow, by the larch
I planted last spring, with one branch broken at the elbow.
I pick it up, wave winter away, I do things like that,
call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw
in the meadow, and they do come, so terribly blue,
their strangled teoo-teoo

        echoing my prayer Dieu, Dieu --
the same Dieu who stained the feather I found
in the barbed fields of the Breendonck Concentration Camp
near Antwerp in 1952. My father tried to slap it
out of my hand: It's filthy. But I held on to it --
I knew it was an angel's. They only killed
a few Jews here, he said, seven, eight hundred, maybe.

        So I wave their angels away with my feather,
away from my father, away from the terribly blue skies
over the Breendonck Canal, where barges loaded bricks
for Antwerp, where my father loaded ships for Rotterdam,
Bremerhaven and Hamburg --as Antwerp grew,
and the port expanded, and his business
flourished, and all the while he kept repeating:

        That's all we needed: a good war...

Inventory

Thanksgiving today. Soaked with sleet.
No sun for six days --six is the Devil's number.
I have looked through this window,
at these American skies for two times six years.
My wall is covered with photographs of distant friends.

This is my third garden. The first two blossomed in Belgium.
Where there is no Thanksgiving. Where my father is buried.
Where I was raised and raped and worked. Where I had five lovers,
but loved only one. Where I gave birth to three children.
A blond son, a dead daughter, a blond daughter.

Shadows grew in my first garden. Two larches in my second.
Because of North sea winds and how they stood, they fused
into one trunk. It wounded them at first, that rubbing together --
the frailest larch loosing sap for months, a lucid sap that glued them
to each other at last. I saw it as an omen for my life.

I give thanks for the lowlands in Belgium.
For Flanders, her canals and taciturn skies. For the tall ships
on the river Scheldt. For coal pyramids in Wallonia.
For the color of hop, and the hop-pickers' songs.
For Antwerp's whores who woo sailors in six different tongues.

Six is the Devil's number. My grandfather and a farmer
killed six German soldiers and threw them in a Flemish moor.
I can no longer give thanks for that: I ask mercy.
Before I die, I'll plant a larch by the moor --miserere--
the soldiers' mothers will never know it was done.

I prayed six times for the death of my Jew-hating father,
I ask mercy for that also: it's Thanksgiving today.
I give thanks for my son and daughter, for the man I love
who taught me a new language.
For this garden's life and sleet.

Before I left for this vast continent,
I stole sand from the river Scheldt,
an inch of barbed wire from a Concentration Camp near Antwerp,
a leaf from the chestnut tree behind Apollinaire's grave,
but no weed, not a seed of it, growing from my father's ashes.

In Belgium, the day is almost over.
Soon, a new century will make History: miserere.
Four larches grow in my garden: one for my son, one for my daughter ó
and far from a moor in Flanders, the other two fuse
here: in America. In America.

Seven Fragments on Hearing a Hammer Pounding
May 31st, 2000

        I sit by a larch, pen and journal
in my lap. Two suns in my tea, the lemon
slice the brightest.

        Tannin clouds the mug's sky,
today's fate still steeps in its leafy depths.
I count each blow of a hammer

        somewhere up the street,
want it to stop after seven, seventeen,
twenty-one,

        anything with a seven,
but it never does, even when I give it
seven last chances. I need

        an augury, a sign to help me
believe that the pounding means something --
something good.

Antwerp, 1947
        My parents, hoarding
profits from what they call
the good war, are happy:

        a million hammers, ten million
nails are needed to rebuild Europe,
and my father sells iron and steel.

        One's misery is
another's happiness, he says
as we drive through

        Pelican Street and what
had been the Jewish Quarter.
I am five.
                           (Fifty years later I remember winds blew dust
                           and ashes through the empty bellies of bombed houses.
                           Some walls still stood. For no one. Gutted doors
                           and windows were like screaming mouths caught in brick:
                           blocks of them. And blocks and blocks of them --)

        Father spits out
his cigarette: Nothing's
changed here, only pigeons

        and rats instead of Jews.
I don't know that word: Joden,
he says in Dutch, Joden.

        I ask what kind
of animals Joden are. My parents
laugh, laugh.

                           (To think I spoke their tongue before finding mine --
                           O Gods of Grief, grant me this: some tongues will die,
                           some tongues must.)

Voting Tongue
        Yet this Spring of 2000, thirty
percent of the Flemish voted extreme
right. In France,

        Austria, Germany, Israel  --
Israel, too --votes speak menacing
tongues and millions

        pretend they don't hear it. And I
write about a lemon slice in my tea?
About needing a hammer to stop its

        blows in groups of seven
because a priest, from behind the barbed
grills of a confessional window

       once hissed to me: "You'll be saved
only if seven generations remember you
as a good Christian"?

Write about Your Times
        1961. Oscar Vladislas Milosz
teaches writing workshops in Brussels.

        I brandish my notebooks filled
with Baudelaire, Aragon, Sartre --

        I'm eighteen:

        Everything's been said, Monsieur Milosz,
        what is left to write about?

        Write about your time, he said,
        nothing's been said about your time.

        Then, on the blackboard:

        Le Présent: Lieu seul d'où j'écris: Soleil de la Mémoire
        (The Present: single Place from where I write: Memory's Sun).

        Two suns in my tea, the lemon slice
the brightest. Today's writing still brews
in a mug's leafy depths.

        From which memory
must I --will I speak?

        Which present do I --
must I --call mine?

Give Yourself in Belief

Glued to the pages of my journal, a letter from a friend:

        "It is necessary to give yourself in belief to the motivating event.
        It is necessary to be gullible. Once that part of the writing is done,
        one has to become ruthless. You must become an expert at the first,
        before becoming expert at the other, even if it means writing nothing
        but junk. At this point in your writing the process is more important
        than what is produced by the process. You need to do more to give
        yourself to the emotion, the event, the story.

Memory's Sun: a vote, emotion, belief --

Thief, 1950

        Oxblood velvet drapes
frame Father's office windows.
Ten million hammers

        pound nails in Belgium
France, Holland, Italy, England,
Russia, Poland,

        and Germany --Germany,
too --building roofs, barns, houses,
churches, schools,

        railroads, and bridges
after the war. Father loads iron
and steel onto Antwerp's ships --

        he's a rich man now.
I wait for him to return
from meetings.           I'm seven.

        A dusk sun strokes
the drapes, his mahogany
desk gleams bloodred.

        I open a drawer, see
Father's pen. I hear ships
from the harbor urge me --

        Doo-it, dooo --so I
reach for it, gold and heavy,
take and uncap it,

        draw a line in my palm--
the ink is green, a strong, hard
green. The door opens,

        Father grabs his pen,
slaps my face, knees my chest,
but listen:

        my need to write
started then, a hunger to write,
to own a pen

        but not, but never --

Summons

        Dusk. On a chair by the larch,
my journal and pen.

        O small Gods of Grief,
grant me to write from seven memories

deep, but not in my father's
tongue --but never with his pen.

from House on Water, House in Air
(Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland, 2002)

The Worlds in this World, The Feather at Breendonck, Leek Street, Inventory copyright © 1977 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Reprinted from The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
Seven Fragments on hearing a Hammer Pounding copyright © 2001 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Reprinted from The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

© All Copyright, Laure-Anne Bosselaar.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.