Peonies Series #1, Pastel, by John Cummings
Two of Us
Italian graveyards come complete with photographs
of the departed. Take this one, in black-and-white,
of a man and wife who are not smiling for the camera.
Why should they, when they know they will end up here
beneath rows of cypress? Her dark hair is combed flat
against her skull, and she stands shoulder-to-shoulder
with her husband, he of the high-collared uniform,
the pencil-thin black mustache, the shako cap
with the narrow brim. On the front of the cap is the white
shape of a bird of prey and the bald number 87.
The more important number, though, is the date
of his death, 1944, that year of Nazi boots and guns
(whichever side he may have been on).
Her date of departure is 1979, marking her as a lone
widow for thirty-five years. Reunited, they stare
at us impassively, no secrets told, as if to say,
Travelers, we are none of your damn business.
____________
Paul Willis
Review by Jared Pearce
The stark and utter lack of sentimentality here is hard-hittingly wonderful.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
And how could we have sung with the foreign heel on our heart, among the dead abandoned in the squares on the grass set hard with ice, at the lamb-like cry of children, at the black howl of the mother advancing on her son crucified on the telegraph pole? Upon the willows, we too, as an offering, hung our lyres, swinging quietly in the dismal wind. (Salvatore Quasimodo, Upon the willows)
And I suppose it would be only fitting to end (alphabetically and logically) this issue (the one I will always remember as the “God’s cave issue”) with a gentle stroll through the graves, looking for a smile and just to say hello to the only ones that, as the saying goes, have truly met their maker. Although most believers are able to find and communicate with God from this side of the fence during this brief and only physical sojourn, it is customary to attribute His full-time presence and attention in the infinitely larger kingdom of the afterlife. God is the smile we decide to paint the afterlife with.
In this life, Nazi boots and guns continue to this day to freely offend his creation, unpunished. The poet tells us clearly where not to find a smile. Not in the hair combed neatly flat against the skull, not in a uniform, whichever side and certainly not in thirty-odd years of lone viduity. We pry the graves for an answer. Unsurprisingly we have no answer, after all, dead men tell no tale. Our only hope for a smile is to hope in an afterlife we shall enter in spirit, no physical entity, no face, no lips, no memory (with no memory being the key factor and I’m thinking about my grandmother here, same generation, only difference she lived past 100 as devoted as ill-fated); because let’s be honest, if the thinnest shred of memory could survive into the afterlife, God would have a very hard time turning some frowns upside down, oblivion might be the only chance for a smiley hereafter.
Review by J. S. Absher
Willis offers an interesting take on the old poetic form, originating perhaps in early Greek poems that come down to us from the Greek Anthology. When the passerby encounters a grave, the dead (through the inscription on the grave, real or imagined by the poet) address the living, usually explaining their death or their sad life and requesting sympathy or a favor. Two examples (in my loose translations from English prose versions):
I was Callimachus, carried off
by death when I was five.
Don’t cry for me, I knew enough
of the good and bad in life.
—Lucian (VII, 308)
*****
Leontichus found me here, a corpse
washed up on this shore,
and over me heaped this tomb, in grief
for his own uncertain life:
he cannot rest, but flits over the whole
wide sea like a gull.
—Callimachus (VII, 277)
Familiar with this tradition, I was startled by the refusal of Willis’s couple to establish contact with the living. Perhaps their refusal has something to do with the cause the man fought for, perhaps it has to do with the modern inability to define “our relationship to the dead,” in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre.
Review by Kathryn de Leon
I love the detail of the photograph of the man and woman. They are not smiling; it makes one wonder why we smile in pictures when we will end up dead and buried somewhere?? Certainly a morbid thought. I remember the comedian Steve Martin talking to an audience decades ago and saying something like “You look happy for people who are all going to die someday.” Will people look at pictures of us when we are gone and wonder about us? Will we want to tell them that we are none of their damn business?