(Cyrus Cassells)
Introduction by Charles Adès Fishman:
There are poets who change the emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic landscape for us, whose words seem to fly even as they stagger with the weight of what they’ve imagined and what they’ve seen. They are our brothers and sisters in this life, yet they leap ahead of us at each stage of the journey because their hearts ache to write it all down, to say what has wounded and exalted them, and they say it with all the blood and flesh still clinging to the bone.
Cyrus Cassells is one of these poets, and the wonder of it
is that The Crossed-Out Swastika,
this most recent gathering of his poems, has an antecedent: Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
(Copper Canyon, 1994), the first part of a projected three-book sequence that
will deal with human rights and spiritual endurance. John Guzlowski and I have
selected 5 poems from The Crossed-OutSwastika that we feel illustrate and embody this goal. The feature includes
links to a wonderful reading Cassells gave in November at the Rothko Chapel in
Houston and to a recent review of this book by Dan Shewan, as well as a
personal statement about his enterprise and his vision.
I would like to add one more item to this feature: a 20-line
excerpt from “The Weight of Brothers,” from Soul
Make a Path Through Shouting: here is the drusy beauty of phrasing and the
moral clarity that I associate with the writing of this exceptional poet:
To see at all is grace:
This child offers the camera
His blighted gaze.
This man peers through a mask of fire;
It has come to this:
Hen feathers, rubble, shards of broken dolls,
Rubbish from the pockets
Of a Russian soldier’s corpse,
Culled from the dust
Of his gutted shelter;
A tourniquet of turban cloth:
His blood and shock
Carried on a ragged mule
Through the winter-toothed mountains,
Over the poisoned ground,
Under hoary stars, grenades
Strapped to kites,
Over the border,
A cusp of iced trees,
To the camp —
A GREAT BEAUTY
And when her son never returned
from the meant-to-crush-him camps,
the crucible of Poland,
always-hard-at-work Isa slept
for endless hours,
and once, under her lids, she was led,
by diligent female Virgils,
to a vast meadow
where an inspirited Isa embraced,
one by one,
countless women who remained
in mourning for their cherished sons.
Gallant and stricken,
together the myriad bereaved
but defiant women formed
an ever-widening circle,
prodigal with bitter tears,
and then, suddenly,
like a jackdaw darting
from eave to sun-drenched eave,
something flew between the throats
of the grieving,
heart-gutted mothers,
and a great beauty arose:
In the dream, Isa recalled,
the singing of the harrowed women
with war-taken sons
hushed the world’s barrenness.
In the dream, the startling river of sound
altered the embattled earth.
I. A Girl of Vichy France
Blue
paper filled her first windows,
not
snatch-gossip sparrows
or the
sun’s reveille,
but a
verdict of iron,
perfect-for-hopscotch
parks,
Seine-lit
stores
with
exquisite engines
of
this-and-not-that,
became,
for “me–first” Sabine, impossible:
everywhere
almond-green greatcoats
and
boots like trampling hooves—
Bells
of invaded parishes
tolled
the sallow hours;
fine-made
mezuzahs were mauled
by
braying patriots,
and
learners whose hair
would
never thin or silver
were
banished from their desks and inkwells:
École de Garcons, rue Neuve Saint
Pierre,
École de Filles, rue de L’ave
Maria . . .
Where
a cellophane France,
all
flyapart assurances,
renounced
Sabine and her peers—
plane
trees and regretful plaques
urging
N’oubliez pas
or Ne les oublions jamais,
so
that the questing pilgrim
or the
alert passerby
might
perceive,
in the
midst of the sumptuous city,
soulhollows
where
even the smallest Parisians
were
obliterated without pity.
II. A Resemblance
A
contrite Paris has unveiled
photos
and still-vile documents to decry
the
specter of sundering trains
aiming
star-patched children
through
tunnels and laconic fields:
11,400
hopes--
Sabine,
who was hidden in the mountains,
has
nudged me to city hall
to
live awhile in the duress,
the
dog’s-snarl cosmos
of
never-grown deportees.
But
will Parisians take time,
Sabine
laments, to bear in mind
the
children of verboten sidewalks,
verboten
parks?
Look,
Sabine remarks:
before
his transport to Poland,
a
brave boy left on a wall,
We are leaving Drancy in good
spirits,
but
for the traveler, the commuter,
today
Drancy, where we Jews were held,
is
only a place you whisk by
on the
train to the airport—
Near
us, some vying kids
are
unsettled
by the
uncanny resemblance
between
a child in a yellowed photo
and a
schoolgirl who lingers,
crestfallen,
hollow before
the
image of her deported twin–
When
the welter of kids passes,
Sabine
whispers:
Ma pauvre petite!
Hurry, we’ve got to help her:
she was too stunned to notice
the girl in the picture lived!
III. Ghosts
Sabine
with her forest-colored blouse
fills
my summer rooms
on the
rue des Rosiers;
on
Sabbath mornings,
Hebrew
singing floats
from
the temple on the rue Pavée,
competing
with the voluble
pigeons
who adore my ledge.
Clear-eyed
Sabine is quick to notice
how my
writing desk faces
the École
de Travail with its doleful plaque
blessing
deported pupils and teachers--
So the
war has become
your devoirs:
Yes,
Sabine, my homework
that I
can’t seem to escape:
My
friend, when I entered your flat,
I
could feel it in my bones:
the
family that once lived here
was
deported!
No
surprise in your neighborhood:
the
Pletzl!
Sabine,
yesterday my landlord read
my
poem rooted in the war
and
revealed: as a small girl,
she
was hidden like you.
Poet,
from cellar to cellar, I remember
I held
onto, of all things,
a
picture book about a magical goat,
inscribed
by my witty father:
This storybook belongs
to Mademoiselle Sabine
the way Paris once belonged
to Marie Antoinette—
Somehow
having that book
helped
me to endure
the
cold and fear---
And
when I returned to Paris
it was
to a world of ghosts,
the
void shaped
by my
murdered generation.
Was it
the same for you
in the
epidemic--
when
you returned,
after
so many deaths,
to San
Francisco?
Do the
men, like my school friends,
still
come to you in dreams?
At the
exhibit, I thought:
Small
as they were in life,
my
playmates,
their
souls must be immense by now.
JULIEK’S
VIOLIN
Even
here?
In this
snowbound barrack?
Suddenly,
the illicit sounds
of
Beethoven’s concerto
erupt
from Juliek’s smuggled violin,
suffusing
this doomsday shed
teeming
with the trampled
and the
barely alive,
realm of
frostbite and squalor,
clawing
panic and suffocation—
Insane,
God of Abraham,
insanely
beautiful:
a boy
insisting
winter
cannot reign forever,
a boy
conveying his brief,
bounded life
with a
psalmist’s or a cantor’s
arrow-sure
ecstasy—
One
prison-striped friend
endures
to record
the
spellbinding strings,
the
woebegone—
and the
other,
the
impossible Polish fiddler,
is
motionless by morning,
his
renegade instrument
mangled
under
the haggard weight
of
winterkilled, unraveling men.
Music at
the brink of the grave,
eloquent
in the pitch dark,
tell-true,
indelible,
as never
before,
as never
after—
Abundance,
emending beauty,
linger in the listening,
the truth-carrying soul of
Elie,
soul become slalom swift,
camp shrewd, uncrushable;
abundance, be here, always here,
in this not-yet-shattered violin.
THE POSTCARD OF SOPHIE SCHOLL
There is
the lightning-white moment
when I
learn—
the way
my costive train to Krakow
stopped
and I
woke to find myself,
in
jostling twilight,
at the
Auschwitz platform—
that the
Italian postcard
I
garnered in Milan years ago
as a
genial talisman,
isn’t of
a pipe-dreaming
Italian
boy,
no, no,
but an androgynous
image of
Sophie Scholl,
the young,
intrepid resistance heroine—
as if
I’d registered,
in my
Schubert-adoring daughter,
my
school-resisting son,
a fire
undetected before:
Doric-strong
nouns demanding
What would you undertake
to stop tyranny?—
stouthearted
nouns:
integrity,
probity, courage;
in
benighted Munich,
the
spit-in-the-eye swiftness,
the unbossed
bloom
of a
crossed-out swastika,
the
fierce integrity
in the
gust of the word freedom
sprayed
over the walls
and
ramparts of a deranged
fatherland
that rent flesh
as if it
were foolscap—
Someday you will be
where I am now,
a
steely, premonitory Sophie
proclaimed
to the rapacious
Nazi
tribunal that rushed her
to
execution—
Gazer,
collector, in clarity’s name,
look
close, then closer:
it’s not
just a bud-sweet,
pensive
beauty,
a bel ragazzo’s charm;
all these
years:
it’s the
spirit of crusading youth
that
I’ve cherished.
AUSCHWITZ, ALL HALLOWS
Look, we
have made
a
counterpoint
of white
chrysanthemums,
a
dauntless path
of
death-will-not-part-us petals
and
revering light;
even
here,
even
here
before
the once-wolfish ovens,
the
desecrating wall
where
you were shot,
the
shrike-stern cells
where
you were bruised
and
emptied of your time-bound beauty--
you of
the confiscated shoes
and
swift-shorn hair,
you, who
left,
as
sobering testament, the scuffed
luggage
of utter hope
and
harrowing deception.
Come
back, teach us.
From
these fearsome barracks
and
inglorious fields
flecked
with human ash,
in the
russet-billowing hours
of All
Hallows,
let the pianissimo
of your
truest whispering
(vivid
as the crunched frost
of a
forced march)
become a
slowly blossoming,
ever-voluble
hearth—
revealing
to us,
the
baffled, the irresolute,
more of
the fire
and
attar of what it means
to be
human.
___________________
A review of Cassells' book by Dan Shewan appeared recently online at The Rumpus. You can read it by clicking here.
Cyrus Cassells is the author of five books: The Mud Actor, a National Poetry Series winner and finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, hailed as one of the Best Books of 1994 by Publishers Weekly, the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, and a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award, the Sister Circle Book Award (for African-American literature), and a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; More Than Peace and Cypresses, a Lannan Literary Selection, named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2004 by Library Journal; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, 2012. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and two NEA grants. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos.
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