Poetry for Students

172 Poetry for Students

Magic dame, cut knot, your ancient wood would

reach back to teach her if it could. Spring rain.

Through it I call to thank her, loud above the joy she

raised me for, this softfall. Sweet time.

In a rather different way, the equally lovely

“Pre-Text,” apparently dedicated to a grandchild,

captures a one-year-old baby’s first steps (“a step

a step a rush // and he walks”) and places him with

tender precision into the puzzles and paradoxes of

time:

Firm in time he is out of date—like a cellarer for al-

tar wines tasting many summers in one glass. or like

a grandmother in whose womb her granddaughter

once slept in egg inside grandma’s unborn daughter’s

folded ovaries.

For finally, as in the eloquent sonnet “Explor-

ers Cry Out Unheard,” Ponsot wants to argue that

“What I have in mind”—the mysteries of time,

age, growth, transformation—constitutes “the last

wilderness,” a new country in which simply to be

is to explore:

I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants, its

gashes full of shadows and odd plants, as inch by

inch it yields to my hard press. And the way behind

me changes as I advance. If interdependence shapes

the biomass, though I plot my next step by pure

chance I can’t go wrong. Even willful deviance con-

nects me to all the rest. The changing past includes

and can’t excerpt me.

The tone of acceptance in which Ponsot artic-

ulates her view of the “changing past” is hard-won

(“I sweat to learn”), but it also suggests the plea-

sure in time’s gifts of ripeness and sweetness out

of which such poems as “Pourriture Noble” and

“One Is One” seem to have emerged. That “joy

may come, and make its test of us” is one of Pon-

sot’s central tenets, an axiom infusing The Bird

Catcherwith much the same delight the “vintner

d’Eyquem” must have felt when he tasted the sur-

prisingly “thick, gold-colored” drops of his first

sauternes.

The special bouquet of age that brings sweet-

ness to Ponsot has a bitterer and often more con-

tradictory flavor for Rajzel Zychlinsky, who writes

in one poem that

The red brick home for the aged smiled to me early

this morning with one bright, sunny wall—an old

smile—that can only be smiled by old people, when

one eye laughs and the other cries. The other walls

of the home, with their curtained windows in shad-

ows, closed, grieved ancient griefs deeply hidden

amid the bricks.

Because she composes her poetry in Yiddish,

non-speakers of Yiddish (including myself) will

never, of course, grasp all its verbal and prosodic

nuances. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, a professor of

Yiddish Language and Literature at Queens Col-

lege, notes in his incisive introduction to God Hid

His Facethat as “the horizons of Zychlinsky’s

world broadened [she] abandoned her sometime re-

liance on rhyme to adorn and buttress the power of

her poems and committed herself to the more dif-

ficult but more rewarding paths of free verse, to the

fires of poetic imagery, dream and hallucination.

The moral stance of her poetry became clearer and

the purity of her voice among the poets unmistak-

able.” This aspect of Zychlinsky’s evolution can-

not easily be traced by English readers. Yet the

powerful understatement and fierce imagery mark-

ing the verse collated in this extraordinarily im-

pressive volume do indeed give her voice a “purity”

that is “unmistakable,” even through the scrim of

translation.

Born in Poland in 1910, Zychlinsky fled to

Russia in 1939, then to the United States in 1951,

but her mother and all her siblings died in the gas

chambers of Chelmno; as Goldsmith puts it, for

more than half her life she has “lived with the Holo-

caust in her house and in her heart.” Thus even the

America of her later years is a country far more

sorrowful than sweet, more rueful than ripe. “What

swims there in the Hudson / in the red light?” she

asks in the poem that opens God Hid His Face:

Who is crying there: Save us, we are sinking? They

are my dead, the cremated, who are sinking again in

my memory.

Haunted not just by the ghosts of those who

died but also by the guilt of the survivor, Zychlin-

sky returns over and over again to such swimmers

in the river of memory, ghosts who bring with them

the responsibility to seek out the truth of loss, to

carry its burden everywhere, to testify about the

weight of that burden and thereby to seek some

measure of healing or at least atonement. In poem

after poem she almost ritually re-calls—that is, in-

vokes as well as remembers—the “severed lives”

she wanders among. In “My Mother Looks at Me,”

her dead confront her with their helpless woe:

My mother looks at me with bloodied eyes out of a

cloud: Daughter, bind up my wounds. Her gray

head is bowed.

Amid the leaves of each green tree my sister

moans. My little daughter, where is she? Rajzel,

gather her bones.

My brother swims in the waters—days, weeks,

years—dragged forward by the rivers, flung back

by the seas.

My neighbor wakes me in the night; he makes a

woeful sound: Take me down from the gallows—

put me in the ground.

One Is One