Leveler Poetry Journal
About Leveler Submission Guidelines More Poems

Spinoza, Irene, Lenses

 

My friend Irene Lust had a real fur blanket,

big enough to cover both of us when we

pushed our cots together

decades ago at summer camp.

It was rescued from Berlin by her parents,

forced to flee in ’38.


Feeling cold on this winter day

despite a pile of quilts

cold as the snow where many years ago

I lost a silver bracelet

when sledding in Central Park with Irene,

I think of Spinoza the Lens-Grinder


expunged in 1656 by the Amsterdam rabbis

for favoring reason over faith,

a daring break from Jewish tradition,

which might upset the good Burghers

who welcomed Jews forced to flee

Portugal and Spain,

doctors, philosophers, financiers,

as long as they enriched the banks’ coffers

and kept their distance.


Bento, the name Spinoza preferred,

continued to celebrate reason

all the while grinding

the finest of lenses. Sharp enough

in my mind to find Irene, her fur blanket,

the bracelet, at least to hone

memory’s blunt edges.




Barbara Lefcowitz

levelheaded: Spinoza, Irene, Lenses


Barbara Lefcowitz has arranged her poem in a very systematic, reasonable and reasoned way. It’s as though sitting in traffic or lounging in bed one monotonous day, the speaker locates certain memories—specifically, those listed in the final stanza (“Irene, her fur blanket / the bracelet”)—and asks herself why those particular memories surfaced. It’s not a poem that gallops or chews; it does not attempt to record a bursting present moment; nor does it guess at or question. Instead, it researches the mind’s wanderings.


If you step back from some poems, including Lefcowitz’, you might mistake them for lists. Squint and the lines that don’t reach the end of the page and textual verticality almost becomes a list. Lists emphasize chronology. Even if item nine could be switched with item four, say—they necessarily give the impression that number one intentionally holds that position. Prose (or even poems using the page’s space differently than this one does), by contrast, is more of a family of ghosts or clouds hanging out on a ladder. What we mean by all this is that the subcutaneous presence of a list immediately lends a sense of organization to any poem resembling one.


The title itself is, if a horizontal one, a micro-list: three nouns, no connecting words. They are concrete things around which the abstraction of the poem, its literal and figurative concerns with the mind, revolves. It’s like the speaker nails her facts to a wall for examination. The opening identifies her friend by first and last names, then enters the fur blanket, a tangible thing. This very tangibility is underscored by the material’s luxuriousness. Also nailed to the wall are times and places: summer camp, Berlin, ’38, Central Park, Spinoza’s 1656, Amsterdam, Portugal, Spain.


The memory of stanza one is, we can deduct, a result of “[f]eeling cold on this winter day.” The insufficient quilts of “this winter day” are contrasted with Irene’s blanket. The cold then sparks another memory, again featuring Irene: that of the sledding expedition.


Next, the speaker, ever-concerned with the mind, “think[s] of Spinoza the Lens-Grinder.” The following stanza could have been lifted from a lesson book, with the exception of its last two lines, which throw in a bit of opinion. And the lesson has remained with the speaker, maybe because of how personal the topic of erasure is to her. Like Spinoza was expunged, her friend’s parents were “forced to flee.”


This confident, efficient poem grounds itself in fact. It is not an amalgamation of sensory detail that leaves the work of connection up to us. It is an elegant display in honor of the human mind, claiming kinship with Spinoza’s rationalism. Fact as often as possible is used to arrive at abstraction. The final line, “memory’s blunt edges,” is notably absent of blankets, places, bracelets, and years.



– The Editors