Steve Orlen
January 2006

Poem Against Ideas


I read in a book that in the Kishinev pogrom
Forty-seven Jews had been killed
But elsewhere I had read
That forty-eight Jews had been murdered
By fire, by stoning, by rifle, knife and strangling.

I wondered if the author had accidentally left out
My Great-Uncle Ephraim Belkin, perhaps because
He was passing though, a boy about ten years old
(I was told by my aunt), and somebody had thrown
A rock at his head as he stood in a bread line.

They were starving, a family of eleven. They had fled
Odessa, and though I don’t remember my geography
They must have been headed west and south
By foot towards Egypt, which was next to the Promised Land.

In Egypt, there’s a family story about a camel and a bride.
Years later, in America, one sister
Would become a Communist, let her hair
Grow long, join the Polar Bear Club at far Rockaway.
She would smoke those foul-smelling Turkish Cigarettes.
One afternoon, a cornice from the roof would fall down
And crush the head of her only daughter, four years old.

Similarly, a woman wrote a book
Called One By One By One, referring to the deaths
Of Jews in the Holocaust, meaning to remind us
That this is the only way to think about
The deaths of so many. The book begins with anecdotes –
A particular group of survivors revisiting
Their home town in Germany fifty years after the war,
Calling on old neighbors, Herr Schmidt and Frau Hamberger.
The graveyard with its displaced, upended stones,
Some stolen to mark a garden path, some to build a road.
The Jewish School now a Cultural Center.
Some of them even “felt more German,” a paradox
I can barely understand.

They were quite moving, these stories, quirky,
As individual stories usually are,
But the rest of the book, which I didn’t finish,
Is an intellectual history and less personal.

I told my son (who had asked) that an intellectual
Is a person who thinks a lot, and then
Thinks about what he thought about, and so on,

Until all experience, all emotions, all relationships,
All stories can be reduced to single words:
Morality, Myth, Paradox, Guilt, and so on.
Then what good is an idea? he asked. It was an idea

About the International Jewish banking Conspiracy
That got Hitler moving
Toward the Final Solution, and certain ideas

Are right now moving the various
Local Militia to take action against the Blacks, Browns,
Asians, Jews, and homosexuals. It was an idea
That got Marx going, and Einstein, and look
What happened there. Even democracy, that grand
Ongoing experiment, was another bad idea
That gained currency because some good men
Took it in their heads to write a document
We could argue about for a millennium.

I remember once getting punched in the mouth
In seventh grade and I will never forget it.

I once had an idea about the essential differences
Between men and women, between my wife
And me, between my wife and all women,
But I’ve since forgotten it. Today a woman told me

My use of the term “son of a bitch”
Was demeaning to women. Behind her, in the bushes,
Was a good idea all tangled up.

There are many petty people in the world.
Look around you. Their ideas
May be right-sounding as the Ten Commandments
God gave to Moses on the mountain,
As seductive as the Risen Christ,
As rational as Fascism, as elegant as E=MC Squared,

But I’d rather be punched in the mouth
Because I’d tried my hardest to take that boy’s
Girlfriend away from him. I succeeded
And landed in the hedges, while she stood by,

Trembling, not knowing what to say or do. I suppose
She felt ambivalent, but that, too,
Is a story shrunk to a word.

I had a Great-Uncle nicknamed Froyem
Who undertook a long walk from Odessa to Egypt.
He was just a boy. I can’t imagine much about him

Except he was the same age my son is now. He was probably
Silly, like my son, he probably liked sweets,
He probably thought girls were put here by mistake
And probably his feet were sore.

He was a good Jew, and he probably thought
God would rescue him and his whole family
From the mess his little world was in.
He probably thought Government was a bad idea

Because it was the government that was murdering
His people. Someone, probably a man
With a bad idea planted in his brain,
Bent over in the rain – I know it was raining –
And picked up a rock and threw it.
What marked the boy as a Jew?
Maybe he had a nose like mine, maybe
He wore a funny hat and had those curly

Side-locks that seem to sprout
Behind each ear like tassels from corn. The stone
Struck his temple. The boy fell down,

My Great-Uncle Ephraim, on the wet pavement.
Maybe he was dead before he hit the ground.

The Talmud tells us that the Biblical injunction
We call “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,”
Is not to be practiced by Jews. The Talmud tells us
If we save one life we save a thousand lives,
And if we take one life
We take a thousand lives, an idea I can grasp.

I have a few friends, who think, as they say,
Conceptually. They don’t tell stories.

They sit around a room and argue. Each
Has an idea, which gets tossed around
Like a hot potato from person to person.

When they talk like that
My attention wanders, and I feel dumb.

But if one of them leaned across the table
Right now and slugged me for disagreeing with him,
Which I hope he won’t, and he knows who he is,
I’d remember that forever. Right here, in my mouth,

So that my upper lip smashed against my eye tooth,
And I’d continue loving him.

A boy named Quegariello, who was in love,
Did just that. He’s a story in my mind, a face
Suffused with blood, a quick sucker punch,

And then the stiff green hedges
Holding up my body.
He was righteous, so I didn’t hit him back.

No idea could displace him, and all my poems
Are dedicated to him, and to my Great-Uncle Ephraim
Who’s only a name and a scrap of story

Told by my aunt, a boy my boy’s age
Who died in the rain in a bread line in Kishinev.
As I recall, the year was 1903.

My friend is still talking in the parlor
Under an overhanging lamp that illuminates us all. The key words
Are binomial and paradox. He wants us all to give up
Thinking one way and start thinking another.

And while he is talking I confess I want
To stroke the wonderfully bony ankle and high arch
Of the woman sitting next to me. She is wearing
A gold ring on one toe, which is linked
To a gold ring on another toe. As she fidgets
The metal catches and reflects the light.

First published in Ploughshares.