V.
These were my thoughts as I wrote the following poem. It makes use of the language and setting from an early Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film, Flying Down to Rio. The title reminded me of a story my father once told me, a story he told me fully because it was not his own:
“V., M.’s husband, refused to leave Germany before the war, even though M. herself refused to stay once the Fascists came to power. So M. was already in Paris when V. was arrested. He was sent to one of the concentration camps, it was not yet an extermination camp, this was when they were ostensibly for political prisoners. And at the camp, V. went into a depression, a clinical depression; he could not get up. The Red Cross still visited the camps in those days, and can you imagine, they got him out because of his depression. M. lobbied the Red Cross from Paris, and they got him out of the camp, and out of Germany.
“V. then joined M., first in Paris and then in New York, but his depression remained. Years later, after the war had ended, he went to Brazil to visit E., a cousin who had emigrated there in the 1920s. What he told my father — your grandfather — was that on his way to Brazil, as the plane broke through the clouds, his depression lifted. And it never returned.”
When N. and I flew to Brazil on tour, this story became my own. I was not depressed like V., but as the plane broke through the clouds, I felt something change in myself. It was dusk — all flights to Brazil from the US leave in the evening and land in the dawn. The sky had been dark near the ground in Miami, but up above was the orange glow of an unseen sunset. We were flying to São Paulo, that upside-down mirror to New York. The war was over, truly over, and in that moment I believe I felt it for the first time. (However briefly. Because I have never been depressed like V., perhaps I will never recover like V., either.)
I ordered champagne from the stewardess. If there had been caviar, I would have ordered it, too.
Later I would sing about the experience,
Flying upside down the earth is blue
That same song quotes Celan, to represent V.’s depression: black milk of daybreak. Because I imagine V. saw dawn for the first time since the camps, as he landed in Rio.
In the poem, the Astaire/Rogers film provides data from the 1930s, because movies are the best evidence I have that there was a world before the war. The last line is delivered by a drunken Astaire, as he watches a parachuter drop from a plane. It is a witness of exile, turned into a punchline. The “gal” of his gag might be any number of allegorical figures — or it might be Dolores del Río, rejecting yet another suitor attracted to “the Latin type.”
*
A Latch to the Ring
“I like music, old and new
But music makes me do the things I never should do”
At the Hotel Hibiscus, survivors gather
There were as many paths here as people
Florida? Is that where we are? Oranges, sun?
It looks like Wilno to me.
Songs move faster than planes, level the landscape. Old tunes,
Familiar gestures, same odd use of verbs:
“Eat an aspirin”
Or adjectives:
“Heliotrope coveralls”
Mark the era. It is the thirties. War not yet.
Where are we flying today? Over a mountain,
So low the pilot points out the occasional passerby, uses roadsigns
At the Pyramides metro stop, when it snows
There is a man who builds pyramids of ice
They hover over the ground like a low-flying plane
Crazy nothing -- that guy writes songs
“Music makes me,” thinks Honey Hale
Yes madame? Pencil.
“Music makes me do the things I never should do”
Shall I lay out your heliotrope coveralls?
We are flying down to Rio for the gala opening of the Hotel Atlantico
All the survivors will be there
They gather wherever we go
We play dance tunes like it’s the 1930s
But they do not dance, they just listen
And remember the conflicts that were
Try the Culbertson system, or Lenz
A fox trot, or a polka
Let’s show them a thing or three
In Brazil we don’t elope; it’s bad taste
“You’re right — here we belong to our families, and our promises —
Even though all we want in the world is beautiful, crazy happiness!”
Love is old, love is new
In Rio by the sea-o
The big number is beginning
It’s the tune we play the survivors
As they disappear
That is, die off
So accustomed to the deaths of others
And to resisting their own
They need a distraction -- use your Brazil nut,
It’s song and dance they crave
Like everyone did
When jobs were the problem and food was expensive
My Rio -- everything will be okay
Rio by the sea-o
“Gosh, that gal don’t care who she gets thrown out of what”