they banged out the brains of the Reichsbahn employees with their dawnflickering lanterns like third eyes allseeing noseeing the corner of Jaffa Road and King George where a cousin of mine thrice removed the Afikomen hid the cousins Godfrey Godfrei and Gott im Baldwin shaved me as bald as Fritzfranz king of the Klingelpütz going off to play Passover or a Purim spiel in the park visiting cousins for breakfast a Volksgarten picnic hiding to huddle like rabbits with the tails of foxes gabbais with the eyes of spies the Birkenau chimneyfar chimneylong Saracen fall from the top of the Temple of Solomon Titusdestroyed Hadrian’s Aelia and the Tower of David the citadel-hell with their jihad enough jumps the plummeting tumult weighed down with luggage the steamers and trunks Azazelattached redtrianglethreaded bound and tied with a goatgag the tines sharps the cutlery butlery whatever you need whatever marks you’ve saved up for the stealing the mealing of bone skullbone and brainmush in quo congregati dederunt nostris maximum bellum per totum diem ita ut sanguis illorum per totum templum flueret tandem superatis paganis apprehenderunt nostri masculos et feminas sat in templo et occiderunt quos uoluerunt et quos uoluerunt retinuerunt uiuos is what I remember from the tutor with her breasts the two of them one Latin one Greek and her licorice clitoris Pope Dorota the tense of her thighs her lap fat squatting at the edge of my bed in a room of my own with floors flaming red slat-planks ganged to fall into the passing dark fields and farm and the house on the Appellhofplatz as grand as the synagogues the Temple on the Glockengasse the Offenbachplatz she’d operetta to me with eau de amour Slavic fou on the tip of her tongue about Zakopane Žilina Sillein her Poletales her Slavgoyishefables about the knights in Christ’s armor shining the sunroundtable the slog and slough of the People’s Crusade covered in moondust and fairypixels desert hoofmatted pawpatted down the Appellplatz the Hellplatz the mustering plots of her stories postcardfalse postdated predated par avionlost to family friends in Los Angeles the American West the Red Indian lullabies the cowboys of Karl May who didn’t need to put their cattle in cars my people my kind of people we all used to do this too we’re guilty all guilty al cheyt thumping chests did the circuit Ashamnu the circuitous route Bagadnu to the east One and True overland portage whether the coached road via the Roman way or firstclass on the boat from St. Nicolas’ Bari and on into Dyrrhachium Bala Cynwood Cherry Hill or Yonkers Westchester County with Bohemond entering Byzantium via Central Avenue the eldest son of Robert Guiscard unleashed trained and flownin like parachuted luggage suitcases and trunks heaped with silverpieces and Familienandenken wares dispersed dispelled exiled galuted like the thumb opposable of John the Baptist brought to Maurienne Rome’s Moriana his body the rest of it left in Samaria with his Salomé head installed as an idol at Damascus as a relic a shrine not to be visited but conquered in pilgrimage barefoot but armed made habitus rooted turned hermitage hovel with central heating and Q & A coffee with Elias and Mauss their gifts of lectern time and dais time all of that bimaside convocational speech at schools and synagogues at JCCs and at YMCandHAs churches even the Cathedral in Manhattan of St. John the Divine we’ve been prodded and pushed we’ve been traded retraded untraded detraded around like goods gone bad like wares without care recorded rerecorded we’re being reeducated into ourselves we testified Nurembergfalse to all these auditoriums all those schools and synagogue dinner fundraisers balls and benefits in boxy carlike foursquare catering halls with the parquetfloor still out for dancing the bearpolka the trained sealquadrille the Katzetnik kazatzka the bard of the czardas mazurka the Parademarsch drumajor the brute master of the ceremonial Ring because how do you whether as a committee or one say testify true to all of that relevant work experience skills set to call it to cry it to name is to lie to yeshivas oceans of audiences Atlantics of public rapt tight in our speech to publicschools dayschools nightschools and once even I spoke to the senate the real live one in Washington the Heights of D.C. the New Jerusalem the whitehoused home of President Rumkowski the Presess of the Rat and the roaches a minority AIDS epidemic that’s where we were reborn and not say the Mount of Olives the pits or sloughs of Despond preaching Peter Eremit of Amiens the alms treasurer of Arqa disbursing generous ragehate giving forth light to the Diaspora’s already overlit underventilated rooms hall after utilitarian halls of conferencerooms meetingrooms boardrooms old age home women groups geriatric tzedakah benevolent charities and university lecture halls after hall and all as part of an annual subscription series the serialized telling of the same anthologized story of mine every time It was August 1944 over and over telling again and again memory machines how we’d been piled into the trains the boxes were the cars for the cattle the kith and the kine going south to go north by northeast through every nowhere town or village we couldn’t name as if children kinder as if one thing and only one thing ever happened in their lives to mine and not children or grandchildren and old widowed love new surgical leases on lifetime guaranteed stents and transylplants my old friends and family in the Appellight the primetimeplatz the drivetimerats racing a rush Floridian south to go north the roaches scurry across me like heartscars like stitches medical alerts advanced leakage protection diapers and bedrails and bathroom benches and eighteen hour mastectomy bras cupped with colostomy plates in their skulls and prosthetics fingers frozen one to another webbed the spinneret ice of SSpiders their rapturous captures the turdpellets the Spanishdirectionsforuse goatpills Elderpryl Gelderpryl Sinemet Levodopa sounds like a shtetl in Polyn im Polen is that Yiddish or Hebrew a language that possesses no superlatives rather doubles itself up like a medication regimen has formulas of formulas instructions for parody satire jokes just the setups forgotten which songs we sang early vs. the songs we sang late what jokes were jokes and where sung the silence über alles die Wacht am Rhein the Horst-Wessel-Lied die Fahne Hochdeutsch Roten und Welschen bangen feigen Wichten humming the tantz the rathskellerdance the harp my Mutter once played the Obermayer with that Babylon sound of her breath by the rivers of the Vistula the Wisła this much is clear Oma’s tears she didn’t make it in the ghetto a month before that Radogoszcz tumult when they closed the doors we shrieked when they opened the doors were corpses already bacillusbones resembling the portraits we drew with fingernail on the walls counting turns and the junctions with thumbs taking pulses the veintrack the nervetract narrow ironmarrow of what did they call it Aussiedlung Umsiedlung which embarkation which disembarkation which the first memory station and which the second or lesser which games we played with memorized cards what jokes weren’t jokes and what originals were better translations Ikh ver alt ikh ver alt un der pupik vert mir kalt is that from America or Auschwitz you’ll never know the problem with truth is that whatever you say suddenly is and God proved it with dung in the lungs with a shout with a scream an Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel exhortative yell at the first sight of Auschwitz the minor chimneys this prophet cried the first he saw smoke as if not from a moving trainwindow but the nest of a boat and the fire not land but an omen his preaching the shriek of the telephonevision downstairs in the stairwell a drugdeal head peals extensions away Riverdale hills past Scarsdale pale Whitest Plains on which nothing exists outside Moab leave it all to hump the gasmaskcamels the mammalian rats the feral catsandogs moving in with their Amalek slaves the nuclear roaches must think I’m already dead the dread Roberts of Normandy and Flanders at the Gate of Flowers for Herod they’re circling me circumambulating me as if for an encore of Jericho warring Godfrey and Tancred and Raymond of Toulouse scurrying down the summit of Mount Zion with the tails of his horses held between legs sniffing me out sounding a low whistling wind the passage of trains A B and C below me floors underground closing in on my islandbed’s watery walls a slow Torahora around this Manhattanroom a synagogue not a studio shul shtibl a Temple temped on the von Roonstrasse Moonstreeted the Luneroad we called them the Psalms and Hashem the Lord Our Gott im Himmelkommando where my barmitzvah was married off to a Son of the Commandments to observe without benefit of commemorative plaque a socialhall party and jestering badchany band get the strudel off the ketubah I never signed for my one hundred and eight Christmas Carnival birthdayburn candles a thin slice of Zyklonyellow crumbly cake too late for the caterers they baked themselves already gassed then hanged why not starved to a rope’s death a wick with a clutch of antediluvian roaches and rats a private simcha for me coopedup carboxedin trying to die celled and alone yet still breathing this deathbed confession this candlebed blessing the meltingwax face of this brownstone gravestone raintoes the snowindow the fall of the first flake in midsummer the ash or soot on my cheek to my taste on the buds of my lips to speak of the first kiss I ever had from Doris on Zgierska Street ul. Hohensteinerstrasse her cousin informing on us he died in Floridian Israel Tel Aviv Kibbutz Sasa Arad the land that once had been Promised where last I heard on the radio television saw ten years ago on the ten o’clock news nothing’s changed just the frequency the channel those two Gods they’re still Crusading the history right the hell out of each other I had relations there relatives cousins I haven’t loved them since Łódź expecting her every day every night to ring bell a knock at the door ding dong rung the swell of her hips the hug around the nooseneck the spine as thin as a hiss the train a snakepiss slither a puffhuff quiver and we’re whistling off south from northeast through Poland for nighthours for days until we pull into Radegast Litzmannstadt Auschwitz Explicit Itinerarium Hierosolimitanorum the words have no awe for me the nameterms just worms squirming lines of the Law to the left to the right to the last I knew of Doris she was a step pushed out of the car out of our boxed as if the present to a gift and thrown as if a bow into the air rapped with its billowing pillows of smoke she was pulled from my arms and my hands shoved away from my finger into the opposite line