"Disappearance—My Euridyce" [by Lynn Emanuel]

Disappearance—My Euridyce                                                            

                                                1967, New York City, East River

From Jackson Pollock, I had learned to hate
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”--                 

Those white, white sheets--
thrown back covers

of the breakers’ unmade bed, and Venus
uncombed, unkempt, always just

decanted from sleep, that hair--
a serpentine peignoir tossed across her shoulders—

I scrubbed my palette down to nothing
but the colors of wash water and zinc bucket.

And embraced the iron light
between Broadway and the Bowery,

and, beneath the streetlights,
the junkies, fellow bees in a hive of misery.

I loved my oppression,
walked Cherry Street to the docks and--

--there--washed out,
dreamy,  creepy,

drowned in her last experiment,
was a rat—

The dry clove of her eye glaring up.
If I bent down I would see

into the broken
hive of bones—

I did not look at her
staring at me from the window of her underworld.

About death
I didn’t give a damn.

I believed my hand
could open any lock.

And even if not,
as I forged ahead,

I did not once look back.

from The New York Review of Books

Comments

[Susan Zimmerman]

Astonishing!

[David Schloss]

Fierce reflections on the good old days...

[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

Ms. Emanuel might have felt the spirits of all those Lenape and Munsee Native Americans killed by the Dutch in several major massacres that occurred in early Manhattan, numbering in the thousands and usually killed in their sleep; men, women, children. Orpheus goes to the underworld and finds he cannot bring Eurydice back with him; Emanuel cannot bring back those lying beneath the Bowery pavement.

Some history behind the loss: In sum, for the entire present-day United States from 1492 to the present, the total number of Indigenous deaths includes the 12 million estimated; the additional approximately 790,000 deaths that occurred in Hawaii, Alaska, in Puerto Rico; and about 200,000 excess deaths since 1900. Thus, the Indigenous Holocaust in this country appears to have taken around 13 million lives. Signally, this horrific number of deaths was only a very small portion of the mind-numbing Holocaust throughout the Western Hemisphere. When the estimated hemispheric population decline of 70 million is multiplied by 2.5, the total number of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1900 appears to be about 175 million. And the number of Indigenous people who have died in the hemisphere because of war, repression, racism, and harsh conditions of life since 1900 surely runs into the millions.
By any reckoning, the Indigenous Holocaust in the Western Hemisphere was, “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.” No words or numbers can adequately convey the scale of the horror and tragedy involved in the greatest sustained loss of human life in history

[Terence Winch]

Strong stuff.