The Ticket
To hear the poem read by the poet, click here or on the title.
| False-faced monument, monument of mind that fades into the story a friend tells in a bar--how her mother and father survived Dachau together, then made each other unhappy for thirty years ... though in the camp her mother seemed to flourish, nicknamed "the Angel" for helping the sick, the old ... but after the War grew negligent, despondent, as if ordinary life was life among the dead, the Angel haunting as she cooked, cleaned, her own face reproaching her for having filled in, the Angel's hollow cheekbones still sharp under her skin: Monument of brick, of crumbling mortar, of a chimney Monument estranging because its image lasts, monument less real |
Monument untranslatable, monument that runs parallel
to the Neanderthal family flickering huge across the screen, the child
I was agog at tyrannosaurus rex stalking them, mechanical:
The ticket in my hand that gives entry to these shades,
moment of spectral smoke skeining from a cigarette,
voices still thirsting to tell what they lived and died,
voices asking our protection in the drifting shifts
and lapses of our attention, the Angel still haunting,
a self-haunter: Monument of mouth turned down at us,
mouth moving: Once you were the Angel; now what are you?
Tom Sleigh's most recent books are Space Walk, a volume of poetry, and Interview With a Ghost, a collection of essays.