Monday's Poem: 'Yizker Bukh,' by Erika Meitner - Arts & Academe

Memory is
flotsam (yes) just
below the surface
an eternal city
a heap of rubble
debris smaller
than your fist
an animal with-
out a leash
organized wreck-
age ghost net

or one hanging
silence on the phone—
she’s gone, my sister said,
and we wept and wept
over my grandmother
while my sister sat
with her body and me
in the static and the rabbi
they sent told her to recite psalms
as comfort so we listened to each other
breathe instead and her breath was
a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted
Chinese jump-rope her breath was the coiled
terrycloth turban our grandmother wore when she cooked
or walked the shallow end of her condo pool for exercise—
our grandmother still somewhere in her white turban sewing
Cornish game hens together with needle and string or
somewhere in her good wig playing poker or
somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN
while cookies shaped like our initials bake
in her oven O memory how much you
erased how many holes we punched
in your facts since who knows the stories
she never told about the camps there are
no marked graves just too much food on
holidays diabetes my mother’s fear
of ships and the motion of some
suspension bridges O memory
you’ve left us trauma below
the surface and some above
like the fact that I can’t
shake the December
my sister’s red hair
caught fire from
leaning too close
to the menorah’s
candles, our
grandmother
putting her
out with a
dish towel
with her
strong
arms.

Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003) and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, has just appeared from Anhinga Press. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech where she teaches in the MFA program. She maintains a website at www.erikameitner.com.

Arts & Academe’s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Memory is serious business. I mean that quite literally. A recent Internet search on the topic showed an array of purchasable self-help books offering aging baby boomers the chance to ward off dementia through an arsenal of techniques and suggestions—Sudoku, crossword puzzles, games, physical exercise, and, interestingly, memorizing poetry. Far more hits, too, for sites selling RAM and other “memory suppliers” for our laptops and handheld devices than for meditations on Mnemosyne, ancient mother of the muses. On a very basic level, too, our ability to register, store, and recollect sensory and other information enables us to survive. Without memory, we would be unable to use language or ponder important abstractions like love, responsibility, God, or time. Or memory itself.

At one end of the spectrum, then, a functioning memory allows us to recall where we parked our car in the morning; at the other end it helps to create and preserve for us a sense of possessing a discreet identity, of being a coherent self at all, a person with a past, a family, a job, a car, to which we must find the stowed-away keys so that we can locate that vehicle and drive it back to a recognizable home when day is done.

It has been especially important for challenged or destroyed communities to create written records of their histories—to preserve their character and dignity, to save them from the ravages of cultural amnesia. Erika Meitner’s “Yizker Bukh” (“memorial book”) refers to one particular genre of totemic memory-keeping. Yizker books, collective memorials to shtetls destroyed by the Holocaust, are usually assembled by survivors and family of survivors. Part description, part history, they often include biographies of prominent citizens and lists of those who perished in the camps, as well as photographs and other ephemera.

Yizker (or Yizkor), which means “remembrance” / “remember” in Hebrew, is also Judaism’s memorial prayer for the departed, recited in synagogue four times a year. Like that prayer, Meitner’s poem begins with the word “memory,” and her poem, a lament for a deceased grandmother, is also a meditation on memory and what it can and cannot accomplish. In fact the poem opens with an invocatory, figurative “definition” that speaks to the obliteration and preservation that acts of remembering entail:

Memory is
flotsam (yes) just
below the surface
an eternal city
a heap of rubble
debris smaller
than your fist
an animal with-
out a leash
organized wreck-
age ghost net

Just as the speaker’s evocation of the wildness of memory, its ghosts, its “organized wreckage” intensifies as perception and as language into disorganized syntax, we have a stanza break, and the poem moves into its emotional setting: the speaker crying on the telephone with her sister, the latter of whom is sitting with the dead grandmother’s body. In their grief, the sisters listen through the phone lines to each other’s breathing, and the speaker’s sister’s breath becomes “a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted / Chinese jump-rope,” triggering a litany, a flood of recollected moments and details from the speaker’s life with her grandmother. The poem swells with these quotidian reminiscences—the terrycloth turban grandmother wore for cooking, the way she sewed game hens together, the wig she wore for poker games—mnemonic fragments that help to organize the “wreckage” of the speaker’s grief.

But when the speaker recalls her grandmother “somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN / while cookies shaped like our initials bake / in her oven,” something about the conflation of language (the letters) and the oven causes the speaker to swerve. Mid-line she abruptly apostrophizes Memory: (“. . . in her oven O memory how much you / erased how many holes we punched / in your facts since who knows the stories / she never told about the camps”), and we realize that this departed loved one was also a survivor of the camps, leaving behind not only memories of an abundant spirit, but a legacy of caesura, contraction (there are “no marked graves”), and trauma.

At this point, the lines shorten again and the poem funnels back toward the left margin as the speaker, momentarily disrupted within her prayer by fresh awareness of all she doesn’t know, and therefore can’t remember (“O memory / you’ve left us trauma below / the surface and some above”), takes us through a passage of seemingly random recollections (“too much food on / holidays diabetes my mother’s fear / of ships and the motion of some / suspension bridges”). Interestingly, the ghost of the Yizker prayer, with its shorter beginning and ending lines and its rich, longer-lined mid-section, haunts Meitner’s poem (though of course the Hebrew reads right to left from a flush right margin). Looked at from bottom to top, the poem resembles the shape of a smoking fire and evokes the image that concludes the poem, an indelible recollection that returns the narrator to herself and to the occasion:

I can’t
shake the December
my sister’s red hair
caught fire from
leaning too close
to the menorah’s
candles, our
grandmother
putting her
out with a
dish towel
with her
strong
arms.

Memory, Meitner shows us, is serious business, vexed, fictive, and italicized by projection, fear, desire. It has the power to deeply console and to deeply hurt. Experts tell us that we can only store so many memories; to make room for new ones, we must sometimes let others go. As the poem closes on its knife point of loss, its mouthful of ash (its “heap of rubble debris smaller / than your fist”), it is the grandmother’s stacked “strong / arms” we most feel, allowing the speaker—who has made, through the poem, her memorial—to lay aside incendiary anguish even as the commemorative flame of witness, testimony, history, survival, and love endures.