Poetry | June 01, 2002
Poetry Feature: Jesse Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Featuring the poems:
- Saving Silence
- Napoleon Vu Par Abel Gance
- Kurutta Ippeiji: A Page of Madness
Saving Silence
“In an astonishingly short time—1895 to 1927, little more than thirty years—the silent cinema evolved into a unique, integral and highly sophisticated expressive form, and then, overnight, became extinct.”
—David Robinson, Foreword to Silent Cinema, An Introduction
Isn’t that the way of things—
where is Carthage now,
the Dodo? In archives
in America, Japan and Russia
there are as many feet
of nitrate film dissolving
as there are bones
in the catacombs of Paris.
Of one hundred and fifty thousand
silent films, eighty percent
are as lost to us
as the dust to which
our grandparents returned.
So why do I care? Because
my mother was deaf,
because I am tired after years
of talk-talk-talk-talking.
Because as a child, I once
rode the elevator
to the top of the Eiffel Tower
where, like God,
I looked down and
saw the whole world
at my feet—
rendered not motionless,
but silent.
Napoleon Vu Par Abel Gance
Impossible Is Not French,
says Napoleon
in Gance’s epic silent film.
He shouts it to the gunners
retreating from English fire
at Toulon. A mere
lieutenant, who has only
just arrived from Paris,
he makes the men
roll their cannon
back into the muddy night
and nails a sign above his new post—
La Batterie des Hommes sans Peur.
I was born in France,
but I am full of fear.
For my children who walk around
with only pink skin
for protection,
for the whole blue world,
watery as a tear.
I was never an optimist
but each year more seems
impossible. I am forty-five.
Napoleon was twenty-four
when he took Toulon
in a blinding storm
with only the hail
beating the snares
of his fallen drummers
to urge his ragged soldiers on.
I want to post a sign
of my own. This is
The House without Fear,
we live here, we French,
and honorary French.
In a time when the emperor
was young
still pronounced his name
Nappy-yone-eye,
like a good Corsican,
more Italian than French.
Still, looking at him,
no one dared to laugh.
Or at least, that is how
Abel Gance saw
his Napoleon.
Abel Gance, maker
of this six-hour silent movie
with its three-screen finale
tinted blue/white/red to match
the French tricolor.
Abel Gance, un homme
sans peur, a man
who believed
anything—everything—
possible.
Kurutta Ippeiji: A Page of Madness
“This experimental silent film was thought lost for fifty years until the director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, rediscovered it in his garden shed.”
—Le Giornate del Cinema Muto catalogue, 20th edition
An old man takes a job
as a janitor at an asylum
to be near his wife
who failed to drown herself
after drowning their infant son—
tiny squalling bundle.
This is Japan. The year 1926.
His wife lies on the floor
of her cell on her futon.
Her kimono disordered—
her hair a disgrace.
Her arms rise from her sides
as she sleeps, her hands open,
begging for forgiveness.
Or is she dreaming
of the moment
she let her child go?
In the next cell, a young woman
dances day and night
without stopping, leaving bare
bloody footprints across
the concrete floor. She is a goddess,
but only she knows it.
If the old man asked her—
she would give him back his son.
But the old man sees
only a mad girl
who once—he’s been told—
danced the May Dance
for Crown Prince Hirohito,
then found she couldn’t stop.
The old man unlocks his wife’s cell
with a key he has stolen
from the desk of the director,
in his other hand are sweets.
Their daughter, he tells her,
their only daughter,
has met a young man who’s asked her to marry,
to move north with him
to his home in far Hokkaido,
that wild frontier island.
When asked, their daughter
told this young man
her mother died giving birth
to a stillborn baby brother.
She understands clearly
if he knew where her mother was—
what she was—
even a boy from Hokkaido
would not take her home.
Your daughter, says the old man.
Remember you have a daughter.
And the wife does—
remembers the young hands
that kept her from the river,
from following
the same arc as her baby.
If her daughter loved her,
she would not have stopped her.
Even now, years later, she can feel
ten ugly bruises
left by her daughter’s long strong fingers.
Even now, years later,
she still suffers with this living
her selfish daughter gave her.
Come, the old man tells his wife.
Your children need you.
Forgetting, at that moment,
only one is still alive.
He uses sweets to lure his wife
from her cell, down
the long stone hallway.
If only she would come home,
the old man keeps on thinking—
our daughter could have children
without moving to Hokkaido.
Children to replace the one
lost to the spring’s cold
rushing water.
He takes his wife’s pale hand
and leads her past the dancer,
who has paused for a moment
to rearrange her hair
in a mirror that is not there.
They make it to the front door.
He still has the candies, and his wife
—who, as a girl, was famous
for her sweet tooth—clearly wants them.
He won the sweets, he tells her,
this morning at the street fair.
This, he remarks, is our lucky day.
Outside, in the dark night,
a dog is barking and his wife
is frightened—she always
has been frightened.
Even before this place,
even before her children
began crying every night.
She is crying now
as she pulls her hand from her husband’s,
runs back down the hall
to her cell, throws herself, sobbing,
into the cold nothing that awaits her.
No daughter, nosey-no-good,
to stop her now.
The old man goes home,
falls to the floor exhausted,
sweets still in his hand.
He hears the music
of the May Dance
in a warm spring
far away
and dreams, instead of candies
he won masks at the street fair—
smooth white faces
with smiling, wide red mouths.
In his sleep, he hands the masks
out to the mad ones
as he mops slowly
past their cells.
One by one the mad
put on new faces
and become as they should
always have been—
smiling, happy.
They laugh gently, stepping
freely from their cells—
children
come home at last
to their mothers,
fathers.
His wife is smiling too.
White world, red life,
the goddess says,
still dancing,
and hands the wife a pillow
that, in an instant,
becomes a smiling baby.
Or did I dream
this ending?
Fall asleep
like the old man and dream
the end I wanted—
because I also had a mother
who happened to go mad,
though I failed
to catch her
when she threw herself away.
Because I too lost a child—
though she fell
from my womb and not my hands,
leaving the water
that was mebehind.
Still, I remember
the end so vividly—
how, in the silver light,
the dancing woman
joined hands
with the old man and his wife,
the red-lipped inmates,
to form a perfect circle.
And the circle, I saw clearly,
was the world
and even I—and even you—
were there.
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