From: ktw@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (kenneth.t.wolman)
Subject: IMPERSONAE (revised version)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 03:28:31 GMT

No apologies about the length of the new version.  Some subjects take
space....


IMPERSONAE: THRENODY FOR MY FATHER
(Jacob Wolman, 1899-1954)

1

My father is the model for Jake Barnes.

He meets Hemingway in Paris, in 1920,
newly discharged from the Marines:
a pale, stocky New York Jewboy who will not go home
to his father in Brooklyn, to his brothers and sisters,
to his fiancee awaiting her Initiation.
I can't get married, he whispers
in hoarsevoiced drunken fury to the would-be writer,
I got my nuts blown off, I can't even fuck myself.

Hemingway hears my father, 2:00 a.m. tearful,
plastered on absinthe and the intoxicating tears of self-pity,
standing by the piano, singing
Puccini's "E lucevan le stelle"
in an incongruous Irish tenor: sees him fumble
with the papers in his pocket, draw them out; hears him recite
weird poetry of gas attacks and amputees.
I did not write this shit, he mutters,
I got them off a dead Limey.

The dead Limey is the poet Wilfred Owen,
and my father has rolled him,
dead on a canal bank in France,
on 4 November 1918,
one ironic week before the shooting stops.

Climbing away from the canal, clutching a folder
of Owen's poems, he is made impotent by a mortar shell.

2

I never knew him, not truly.
So none of this, of course, is true:
except as we imagine might-have-beens,
take the few facts that freefloat in the nurturing pool of ignorance,
and invent the past, manipulate and prune the shoots
in despite of Truth, admitting that to own the past is not
to own the present or the future, but only to style them for ourselves.
For style is all.

He has grown in a world without women, where women bear
and finally are borne:
where he stands, already older than the century, age 13,
in a field in Queens,
holding his younger brother Saul's hand,
supported by his older brothers, Harry and Sam,
enveloped by their father who stands stolidly, beyond grief,
relieved to be free at last of his wife's dying cries:
and by his sisters, who are not women either:
only Helen, already, silently, the family disgrace,
the _oysvort_, the _kurveh_ derided and ridden by young men on the
   street:
and by Gussie, at 15 already old, less his sister
than the spirit of his mother, dead of a cancer in her womb,
in her final months a wet-eyed morphine-ridden ghost
vomiting blood in the kitchen sink, living long enough
to witness him become bar mitzvah.

And he already has felt the stirrings of a man: jolted
by the stickiness on his legs, he has awakened
from visions of faceless girls
to the shrieks and whimpers of his mother,
to his father's soothing-irritated moaning voice,
lost in its own helplessness: _Ribono shel Oylam!  Sha, Becky, sha!_

Even mourning cannot stop the dreams.
He creates his own being by night, finally by day,
hears only what flows thickly within him,
learns that the dreams can silence the sounds:
that only cries can silence cries,
and that we make ourselves:
as I have made him here,
as I have created my own being.

That is what I have learned from my father.

3

In 1918 he is in the Marines, and carries orders
to a British officer at the front.
It is Owen.
Imagine Owen chainsmoking Woodbines
on the night before the final battle,
writing a letter to the railway clerk father
with whom he shares a mutual sense of shame,
in one being responsible for the other:
or--like a good poet maudit--writing a poem
he knows he will not live to finish,
for he has seen in dreams the German bullet
on which is written _Die Name: Wilfred_.
Interrupted by my father
knocking on the tentpole on a soaked November night.
Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, Manchester Regiment,
lowers his pen, tosses the poem or seals the letter,
(and either way)
lights a cigarette and waves my father in:

who sees the letter on the table, and merely shrugs:
or sees the verse-broken lines in the notebook
and thinks _another poet-pansy_.
For my father, street-punk from East Broadway,
has left school in the 7th grade,
before they got to the unit on Appreciating Poetry,
and to him the poet is a faggot fruitcake
who writes of love, not fucking.

So Owen seduces my father.
Oh, not in fact: far be it from me to torture this fiction
and encompass imagined copulation of my father with another man!--
and Owen, homoerotic devotee needing to be a parvenu,
will not violate military courtesy and bourgeois manners
by proposing such to an enlistee from an allied force.
Instead, he hands my father, drenched by the driving rains,
a glass of Scotch whiskey, then another: they get drunk
while Owen shuffles papers in his briefcase:
then, without asking, begins to read aloud,
relishing the power of his words and his whiskey-greased voice,
of an anthem for doomed youth,
of passing bells for those who die as cattle,
of mustard gas attacks and swollen hideous faces,
of enemies meeting beyond the field of death and the grave itself
in final understanding that comes too late.

And my father, when Owen slumps backwards,
passed-out in his chair, sits with tears running down his cheeks,
staring at the poet-officer, gasping
_Why have you done this to me!_
Owen snores in his chair and does not answer.

4

The next day, toward late morning, he is shot at the canal bank.
My father is 5 miles away, behind his own lines:
in this version, edging toward truth, there are no stolen poems,
and he, never Prometheus, not even in his own mind,
is not punished for the theft of the poet's fire
with the loss of his balls.

5

There is no poetry in this version:
that is, there is nothing ennobling.
My father stays in the AEF, stays in France,
but having heard Owen, cannot go home.  That
is what poetry has done to my father.

6

He is in Paris from the Armistice until the end of 1919:
finds a French woman, young war widow, tending bar,
hears in his head the voices repeating the camp song,
_Mademoiselle From Armentiers_.
She looks at him, her eyes consumed by glowing darkness,
by things she will not, cannot, name:
unused, in starvation for love,
she draws him home, to the room next to where her child sleeps,
and her mother dozes in the chair by the small bed.
And because she senses he knows nothing,
leads him into her room, stands close to him,
almost inside him, in the darkness,
whispers words--_Make me die!_--he cannot understand.
In the sullied moonlight, she is only an apparition: windblown,
shivering in the cold of the underheated flat:
but he feels the breasts under his lips, as she urges him,
shocking, heat-mottled, confusingly soft
against the hardness of her ribs, the pain he read in her eyes:
and once guided inside her slithery strangeness, believes what?
Feeling the current rising through his legs, his spine,
exploding inside his brain before flowing into her,
knows what?--
only that once he put his finger in a light socket,
and his mother beat him,
and his sister Helen the _kurveh_ laughed,
and it feels like that now,
even to the mourning moan that escapes from his throat.

She loves him, teaches him to love her, for a week.
After the second day he sits on the floor, plays with her son,
lets the child, only 4, teach him love songs that neither understands.
All he understands of the widow are her nightcried words
as she heaves her hips beneath his,
_Je t'aime, oh amour, oh! je t'aime!_
and he knows he is fucking her right.

There is no poetry in his love:
nothing to convert action, to explain it beyond the Deed.
He has never met Owen, never heard the words
that turn the horror he has seen to something understood,
a form of prayer.  Instead
there is only the Deed and the Fact:
that if you shoot a man in the belly, his guts will spill out,
that if you pump inside a woman long enough, she will come
and tell you _Je t'aime_.

When his enlistment is up he goes home.
There is no Hemingway, no Jake Barnes,
maybe no French widow: only Duty, only the Deed.

He is potential stripped of possibilities.

7

What did he remember that he could not tell me?
There is no History here, only his eyes, raging gray,
killer eyes, balcony eyes, that look out toward unseen faces
perhaps recalled:
toward seen faces, their souls magnetic,
their hearts attached to his brain with ganglia,
like ropes drawing at the Hindenburg.
And when his brain finally explodes, bursts into flame,
too soon, too late after a life lost,
all that is left are the images, the cries of
_Oh! The Humanity!_
for one who came home to be at home nowhere.

Kenneth Wolman, January 8, 1993
-- 
Kenneth Wolman          |       To die of fear of revealing yourself
AT&T Bell Laboratories  |       to the person who loves you is murder. 
(908)582-4815           |       
Kenneth.Wolman@att.com  |       	--Stan Rice, "Anne's Curls"