Three Poems by Michael Lieberman


Lemonade


Eduard Oppenheimer headed east,
a guest of German transport,
squeezed against the lurching planks,
dryness in his throat.
He alone imagined Venice,
the Jewish Quarter near the foundry.

The old ghetto scratched his throat.
Mandolins did not trill across the water
and lilies were not heaped in shining.
In the harbor there were no the gondoliers
punting the doge and his worthies.
Vivaldi was not singing in San Marco,
nor the bells. A pitcher of lemonade
drew him to a table on the plaza
that no longer marked the Jewish Quarter.

The sea flooded a last verge of addled sense.
He tasted salt fish in the ghettos of Poland.
Then he thought only of salt.
His brain stem longed for ice.
Heaven was nothing but snow.
The fluid of his axons dribbled to a halt.
Brain waves evaporated in a dry lake bed.
Now Eduard Oppenheimer would have his lemonade.




Still Life With Tire, Gravestone, and Boulders


Because it lacks
the formal elements of Cézanne,
we need a curator
to explain the method
and a geologist to put us
straight on boulders,
a chemist to analyze
the rubber of the tire.
We must push aside the rasp
of leaves and branches,
step through the trash
and touch the script
on this gravestone's face.
It marks an unremembered life.
Not a gravestone even,
but a marker fractured
by gene-driven evil
and chaotic force.

 

Deutschland Uber Alles

It is said all Liebermans come
from one small town in Germany,
at least that's what another Lieberman
said to me one spring in Philadelphia.
He went on, It doesn't matter how it's spelled
"Lieberman" or "Liberman" or "Liebermann,"
we all come from this one town,
we're all related!
Can't be, I said, It's a common name
among the Ashkenazim.
"Lieberman," German or Yiddish
for beloved man or dear man,
it's not a name like Adam
that we can trace with certainty.
It is, he said, My father's a genealogist
in Israel. He's done research.
O, research, I said, Well, that's different.
Research, that's really something.
How interesting, I thought.
We belong there-Liebermans
nestled among the Goethes
and the Heines of this world,
snug almost.
We're German after all,
above all, above all else.

 

MICHAEL LIEBERMAN has published three collections of poetry, including Praising with My Body (a chapbook, Thorn Books), A History of the Sweetness of the World (Texas Review Press, winner of the Texas Review Press Breakthrough Prize), and Sojourn at Elmhurst (New Rivers Press). He is associate poetry editor of High Plains Literary Review and won the 1999 Pen/Texas Prize for fiction. In another life he is a research physician who studies genes and the environment and chairs the Department of Pathology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Regarding the above poems, Michael Lieberman wrote: "They are part of an in progress collection of poems that explores the Holocaust from the perspective of the present and how we witness and remember events that we have not personally experienced."


ForPoetry