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Lost
in Translation
My
childhood was filled with untranslatable points
of view—the way the child came under the wheels,
Das Kind kam unter die Räder.
When
the child was run over,
it was her fault. Did it
have something to do
with the order of things? Children
are
disorder—they run under wheels
like lizards. Even the
signs on the trains
as we traveled through my father’s country
reminded
us how much was
expressly verboten (forbidden),
how much our tongues divide us.
What
was not my mother’s cup of tea
was not my father’s beer.
Das ist nicht mein Bier, he’d always say.
Traveling
into each new lexicon
is to inhabit a new country,
map its pathways into the mind
Every
language a labyrinth, weaving
more than words, but a cultural Psyche,
sorting the grains in the syntax.
In
Russia, they lock the doors
not to let thieves in,
while America keeps thieves out.
In
Colombia I learned that fear
doesn’t ride on a burro—El miedo
no anda en burro. Fear
hath wings
and
the reason given for so many things
is por sus pistolas—for your pistols
(just because).
Pushing
through a thick net of language
all my life, trying to find some way out
from under the wheels
Always on the shore of another culture
even in this ancient bond—marriage
searching for the words I’d need
to
make my way in that new country,
only to be told that there simply is
no word in Greek for privacy.
Only
secrecy. Or loneliness.
Catacombs
(Under Odessa,
1943)
I.
The
midwife stroked the mother’s hair—We’ll turn
the child, she said aloud, Just breathe.
Inside, she prayed, Turn,
turn, child, turn.
Please let her turn. Please
let her breathe.
Eyes still filled with the massacre
in the square at the Black Sea harbor,
she tried to calm her charge, assure
this mother of the child inside her
Remembering the children—the piles
sorted out. No—if she
could save
this one—she reached and prayed—
There in her palms—she held the child,
her hand in a fierce, tiny fist
declaring her will to exist.
II.
The
rest of the resistance (and those who didn’t resist)
were gathered in the shallows of the Black Sea
and set on fire. We fled to
the catacombs
with what we could carry, came out only at night.
The caves stretched for miles in every direction,
and the Germans hardly knew they existed.
It was the safest place not to be found.
My
daughter was born there—underground,
blackened by the soot from our fires.
They held my mouth to save our lives
and muffled the child every time she cried.
Somehow
she must have grasped the circumstances
of her birth, or else she learned quickly
what it meant to survive at a time like that.
She spent the first years of her life
hardly allowed a sound.
Women
of Souli, (Greece, 1803)
When the women of Souli
knew the forces were near, they slowly
gathered their things. They
could see
the
fires in the distance. They
dressed
for the invaders in all their finery,
embroidered skirts and crimson vests.
Their
men had been slain
and they would all be taken away,
their children given to the troops
to
be raised to forget their first years.
The women had practiced for this day,
still burning fires, until the moment when
they
knew the final news, gathered their children,
and began to dance with slow steps, turning
faster and faster, toward the cliff ledge
and
one by one, they danced over the edge.
The
Cottage
In years when summer left that
bone-white ring around my ankle stretched
taut between one shiver and the next
and everywhere was blue and darker blue
and purpled at the sash around my waist.
In
summer years of all those perfect white
long-forgotten dunes that stood beside
each other bearing witness to the light
of storms that brought the elbows
quickly to their knees.
When
years made summer turn round like a spit
between the ears and every glance
was like a slow-remembered answer
split across the lip
spreading like an egg dropped in a skillet.
A
yellow eye that hardened quick
spit fierce in all that heat
and Mama screaming cottage walls
are thin, far too thin
and neighbors shouldn't know that we are here.
It feels a little cooler now that Dad is gone
The eggs are done and quiet in the pan.
Fresh
Water Furnace
Right now I am one room from the center
of the house, with something like the smell
of gas in the middle of the night,
and someone thinks to light a candle.
There
are things better left pure energy.
I
sit cross-legged in the center of this room,
pry open live shells, string fresh water pearls,
save the misshapen ones for myself,
the ones that haven't had enough
time to grow over into themselves.
As
I string them, I look at each one,
each small shellfish in its shell,
that had to hold this stone
inside itself for life.
Poetry ©
Diane
Thiel 2004. All
rights reserved.
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Diane
Thiel is the author of four books of poetry and nonfiction:
Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2000),
Writing Your Rhythm (2001), The White Horse: A
Colombian Journey (2004), and Resistance Fantasies
(2004). She has two textbooks forthcoming from Longman in
2005. Her work appears in Poetry, The Hudson Review,
and Best American Poetry 1999 and is re-printed in
over twenty major anthologies, including Twentieth
Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill). Thiel was born
and raised in Miami and received her BA and MFA from Brown
University. A recent Fulbright Scholar, she is on the
creative writing faculty at the University of New Mexico.
Visit her web site
here.
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Portrait
of Diane Thiel © Henry Denander 2004. All rights reserved.
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