April 12, 2010
Here is another collaborative picture-poem between me and brother-of-Bumblemoth in Germany, Paetrick Schmidt. I wrote this for him in deep winter, in Strasbourg, a sweet city of spirits and smoke. It was a dreary and delightful day of crystalline drizzle. A thousand layers of wool were not enough to block the cold, and yet in that city I felt united with the chill. As if my bones welcomed it. My marrow called it in. The air was brittle, candied…
POETRY FOR SMOKE (c) Paetrick Schmidt & Quintan Ana Wikswo
I was there absorbing the atmosphere in my grand tour of witch burning sites. But I discovered an intriguing grim history from the days of the Black Plague, when on Valentine’s Day, 1349 – a Saturday, Shabbat – two thousand Jewish children, women and men were taken to the Jewish cemetery and set on fire by the leathermaker’s guild. This event figures in my book-in-progress, and that day its poems were born when I sent this fragment from Strasbourg to Berlin, a little carrier pigeon, a little messenger bird.
I watched the smoke rise from the chimney-pots of Strasbourg’s medieval row houses, and thought of what had happened in those homes. The decisions made of what people to set on fire: first the shamans burnt, and then the Jews. Humans who seem more than human, and thus become de-humanized.
What rare spirits there were turned from flesh to soot and air.
Strasbourg is one of the most luminous landscapes in the world, by my eyes. Its stones glow. Its rivers are wild and savagely white-capped anywhere they are contained. Standing on the bridges, it’s a kind of riding. Atop blue monster, a man with bent back.
I was so transfixed by the city that I made no pictures – what always happens when I am most moved. Reading today in Andrew Joron’s genius book The Cry at Zero: “an image swims best when it is close to drowning.” I had drowned, and my body snagged in the gristle of history. Making images was far from my mind. Joron talks of the lament. Birds know that poem.
And so I sent this fragment of poem off to Paetrick, with no context, and he made the image my mind could not: the monsters that stand at chimneys, and the slow dawn of knowing…the witnesses come to mourn the horror of what’s been done.
And always the birds, who sing a lament without words, with beauty, communicating a mystery that humans cannot yet decipher.
Birds, our poets with beaks and secret tongues.
For other collaborative pieces Paetrick and I have done, take a look here, and follow the subsequent trail.