“Ghazal for the Nightmare of History,” Three Poems, Benjamin Balthaser.

Ghazal for the Nightmare of History

for P.L.

You come downstairs to share

your burden: our bodies

 

wedged uncomfortably in chairs: these

pages in Russian: ghosts embodied

 

without addresses or eyes. The

hours are against you, your body

 

and its weight of flesh & voice: we

read: women herded into vans, body

 

parts broken open, a rib-cage

shattered by metal bars: bodies

 

upon bodies charred into fibula, spine,

and voice-box: into a mash of bodies

 

no longer human: into shapes

neither dark nor light: there are no anti-bodies

 

for the name that streaks like blue flame in these

KGB files: your grandfather, on whose body

 

fitted the black and red Nazi uniform: can guilt

descend through generations? The bodies

 

of Eucalyptus press at the cement

and do not enter. They lift, bodiless,

 

without arms or ears, just blue seeds

that drift on wind, without the body

 

of memory that haunts you: you want

to evoke our friendship: my body

 

to provide an alibi: the crimes are listed:

they do not belong to you: just somebody

 

who bears your name, your pale, sandy hair, your

blue eyes that reflect, so perfectly: my body.

For Admiral Peary: Arctic Explorer

It’s hard not to believe in you. The dry

snow of confetti covers New York

 

as you parade Madison Avenue, Times

Square, having reinvented the country

 

with a pair of faulty coordinates: our shores

of melting snow can now be forgotten -

 

polite girls or maps made of paper.

In return, we made you a kind of saint:

 

living alone on your island, facing

the hard coast of Maine in an office

 

crested with battlements and cut stone,

a compass in the tile tracking due north,

 

your thick Siberian mustache along with

leather bound books never opened or read.

 

I’d like to say we love your imagination:

 

on an island bristled with summer blueberries,

you dreamed of a shifting point in the snow.

 

That to make yourself someone you stopped

building canals and went to the heart of

 

the wasteland. Your one friend Henderson

died of bad crabmeat on the way back from Alaska

 

and when you returned, black ghosts and doubles

followed you everywhere, collecting confetti in

 

their pockets, as you learned taxidermy on pigeons sick

with the city’s poison. But we spared ourselves

 

the last act. As the Dutchman stood at the world’s

center two years before you, you planted a flag

 

on the ice-cap and marched home, you will

to walk on sheer pain, feet frozen to numb stumps

 

mattered more in the long run. In Manhattan today,

each gutter glistens like a horizon, every

 

window seems a frontier that you could build

a life striving towards. What you asked for was not much:

 

perfection, a pair of numbers on paper, a sheet of salt-ice

a hand could harden into shape, a name etched

 

on a surface harder than a tombstone. I’d like to say

you died found out, stripped of your admiralty

 

or at least forgotten, but America loves your fraud.

Postage stamps fly to other countries with your lean

 

New Englander’s face, and young men die,

their bodies the color of uniforms.

 

Meteor Shower, November 18, 2001, not in Afghanistan

Like a shadow falling into a second

and deeper shadow, light falling into

 

darkness, we try and imagine space,

wear fugitive blankets around our shoulders,

 

sit silent as refugees. There is frost in dry sand.

A spasm of branches in late November wind,

 

a dark green wood that glistens like a wound.

 

The meteors make no sound; they glide

like rockets, their trails bend like the backs

 

of dancers, unreal, untouchable, and we

can’t say why they don’t reach the earth,

why they glisten and die out so comfortably

 

above us, or why here, in along the banks

of the Connecticut River, it’s hard to believe

this stark invasion of ash, ice, and wind.

BIO: Benjamin Balthaser’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Minnesota Review, Laurel Review, the anthology What Saves Us, and elsewhere. His 2012 collection of poems from Partisan Press, Dedication, details the lives of blacklisted Jewish activists during the McCarthy era, and his 2016 book from University of Michigan Press, Anti-Imperialist Modernism, explores connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century. He is currently associate professor of multi-ethnic literature at Indiana University South Bend and lives in Chicago.

Artwork: Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781).

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“Tower of Babel,” Two Poems, Manon Voice.

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“Voice from Ukraine,” Three Poems, Vyacheslav Konoval.