Barbara Krasner

My Father as a Shadowbox with Six Compartments

after Joseph Cornell
 
I.
A crib to hold him as a baby, his chubby and wobbly legs held steady by outstretched hands His straight blond hair newly cut with the help of a bowl. That same crib holds him as a toddler, his straight blond hair still cut with an upside-down bowl. still dressed in all white but this time with a sailor bow at the neck. Here he is as a toddler standing on a chair. In the same box he appears with his first bowl haircut, dressed all in white with his high-button black shoes. 
 
II.
A crate to corral him as he takes charge of his younger brothers. Now dark-haired, he is dressed in a plaid shirt and plaid socks. He wears short pants, not yet old enough despite his protests to wear long pants, a rite of passage into manhood.  
 
III.
A barrack, long and skinny, his home while training in the US Army Air Corps. From his lips dangles a cigar as he sits on the steps of the Mississippi bunk. 
 
IV.
An aircraft carrier that radios its equipment needs to him as supply sergeant. He sits for his official military photograph, the eagle prominent on his cap.
 
V.
A concrete and brick structure, his nine-to-five home at the supermarket he and his brothers established in 1953. The signage proudly announces [last name], a legacy continuing from his parents’ general store next door.
 
VI.
A casket that anticipates his heart failure from dialysis even as he sits in gray-haired retirement at the family reunion table, his glasses tucked into his plaid shirt pockets, his lips dangling a grin.
 
**

On the Anniversary of Your Death, 1 Av 5711 (August 3, 1951)
 
I give you a larger ladle to cook the Shabbos cholent so I can taste it along with your Galitizian Yiddish vowels. I show you how to use a glucose meter and I will schedule your appointment with the endocrinologist and drive you there myself. With my help, you will live longer so your grandchildren will know how it feels to hold your hand and crawl into your lap, taste your stuffed cabbage in white sauce with raisins. I will hand you sturdy handkerchiefs when you learn your brothers and sisters have been gassed at Belzec. I have filled out and submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem to remember them all by name. I am your mouthpiece, your eynekel of eyneklikh, not the eldest or the shrewdest, but the one who will always stay by your side no matter what. I offer you the family tree that Cousin Izzy kept on a window shade until someone threw away. I reconnect your family as much as they are willing, even Cousin Blanche’s nieces who don’t know of the fight you and Blanche had. But I do, because Blanche wouldn’t talk to me when she found out I am your granddaughter. I am not named for you, unlike my sister and two cousins. But you know I have the mettle to cross that chasm between here and there, between past and present, between our generations. Eva, I bear witness to your life, stand in your spaces. I give you zakhor, remembrance, visit your gravesite because my father, your eldest, showed me where it was, and light the Yahrzeit candle in your memory.
 
**
 
The Prodigal Granddaughter Comes to Zaromb (Zaręby Kościelne)
 
I stand in the place my grandfather deserted, the place where his father disowned him, where his ancestors lived for generations in lopsided wooden houses, sinking into the Brok River bed, where they hid in root cellars when the Polish or Russian raiders came thrashing over the shtetl’s four gravel roads, where wedding processions marched through the marketplace to get to the brick synagogue guarded by carved lions of Judah, where Soviets dug surveillance trenches in Leshner Forest at the end of no-name road, where I visited in 2008, and nearly kissed the ground, grateful my grandfather left in 1913.
 
**

Barbarossa
 
Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa had a red beard and lived in a cliff called Kyffhäuser. I had a red beard, too, as I performed my German class play I wrote about Barbarossa. I was meant to write about him, our names so similar. Tom, a member of my cast, made a sword of foil and lunged at the district superintendent observing the class, mortifying our German teacher worried about tenure. Legend has it that Barbarossa never died. He remains in Kyffhäuser awaiting the call with his knights to restore Germany to its greatness.  He led several twelfth-century Crusades. Nazi leaders chose to honour his legacy by naming their June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa. My Belarusian cousins were rounded up and eventually murdered just like their Rhineland ancestors during the Crusades. My German 3 textbook did not mention the medieval massacres or Operation Barbarossa. I tossed my red wig and beard into the trash. I burned the script.
 
**

Erasure
 
I didn’t notice building façades, meticulous frescoes, extreme Fraktur serifs above doorways, barbed church spires, medieval watchtower gates, upper market alleys of pattern-painted homes, Stockwerk labyrinth to remind centuries of passersby they were in Germany. I didn’t notice blueprints of intercultural friendships, construction of alliances or architecture of camaraderie.
 
I knew how to take the red accordion bus downtown on my student pass. I knew how to trek through the valley, past sheep, to university. I knew how to listen in class and eat in the student Mensa to save money.
 
Through Facebook, I reach out to Debbie from my Junior Year Abroad in Germany cohort. She says she has no memory of me. I’d been the ghost of Haus R dorm, the American student who didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. who buried agoraphobia in words and pages, who hid ink-stained hands in aerogram folds, who protected herself.

 
**

Jam Session Syncopation
 
after Jazz by Man Ray (USA) 1919
 
It’s all about the beat, the burnt sienna of the saxophone, the eel-silver of the trumpet, the guitar’s hazy hollow sliding through barren white into tangerine, all swirling in swing, harmonizing with harmonica, bebopping the blues to slip into the groove. The conductor drives rhythm’s key as we scoo-bee-doo-bee-do along.
 
**
  
All That Jazz
 
after Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock (USA) 1950
 
Falling leaves drop their chaotic chords as they swirl in the wind from branch to ground. The daytime clarinet growls its shrinking hours while the piano percusses September’s light to December’s darkness. And in between the rain, fog, and sometimes snow, the trumpet shouts celebration, the drum cracks time, and the saxophone wails yet another loss.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner became enamored with the prose poem through Lorette C. Luzajic's WOW workshop. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.