History

Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides

to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes

exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea

to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin

and of course organs, some members dismembered

to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way

to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling.

Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang

the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course

departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow,

the man on top of a boxcar waving,

his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining

the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book,

knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough.

Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders,

endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you,

of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past,

the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil,

of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart

for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic,

the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them

to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism,

and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships.

Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined,

families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns

to talk to their people on the other side,

of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another,

a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates,

and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral,

of course of course of course of course,

now then, negotiations, whatever,

palisades, the end of whimsy,

but then one evening though it is wartime,

a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight

and history stops talking for a moment and sighs

while the melancholy of Albinoni

passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little,

the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental,

and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory

of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car

a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory

of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace,

and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells

and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet,

waiting out the storm with a sheep

that had come up to lean against your side

like a rock.

Copyright Credit: "History" from One Hidden Stuff by Barbara Ras, copyright © 2006 by Barbara Ras. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: One Hidden Stuff (Penguin Putnam Inc., 2006)