Levelheaded: Dream of My Father’s Shiva, Auschwitz, 1942

It’s impossible to say for sure, but it’s unlikely a Shiva could have been conducted upon a death in Auschwitz. Not that it would dramatically change the workings of the poem, but we think this Shiva is part of the dream, the speaker’s dream of the aftermath of her father’s death in unspeakable circumstances.

If this is true, the poem, as the Shiva would, serves as an opportunity to mourn this death in a way that would have been impossible as it happened, and perhaps also nearly impossible now. As dreams go, elements of horror work their way in, turning the unimaginable to the imagined, as visual and sonic elements carry the core of the poem’s imagery. The speaker hears the fanning of a windmill and the humming of air. She sees a “relentless field,” a mass grave site really, and smokestacks―perhaps the clearest symbol of death when thinking of the Holocaust.

The windmill, the smokestack, the field―all contribute to a rather quiet atmosphere, once again portraying the paralysis that follows an attempt to contemplate or grasp a disaster of this magnitude. Speechlessness pursues. Yet there is one occurrence breaking the silence, serving as the attempt to break the silence: the speaker is “at the [plow’s] steer / shoveling / bodies / to find you.” She finds her father indeed, deathly blue, reminding her of “Lake Michigan”―perhaps a leap into the present and a way to shake the ground by assigning an element of reality to what may seem unreal. Yet in that moment, nearing some kind of conclusion, “the plow / turns to the building / with the lone smokestack.” The smokestack, like the horror of the subject matter, is inescapable. There is no other conclusion or comforting image.

The speaker ends with admitting this metamorphosis of the momentary find of the body into the unsolvable smokestack happens “against my desire.” This half-sentence in its own stanza hangs in mid-air, ending a poem that appropriately has no periods, no rational stops or emphasized room for breath, even with all the wind around. It is possible that the whole thing is against her desire: the poem itself, the shoveling in the field, the loss of the blue body, the continuation of life.

Yet we continue, having nowhere to go yet forced to go somewhere. We let our surroundings morph again, this time into “another world,” into “the city,” perhaps the Windy City near Lake Michigan.

– The Editors