Drawn by what he wants to implicate
in the resistance of the bourgeoisie,
the scholar, sitting on a harp-shaped chair
while the projector shudders with banked light,
picks out a detail on the plaster screen,
flips the shutter, and stares again upon
Hitler's procession through the Montparnasse,
the cameramen and staff elated as
the motorcade sweeps past the boarded doors-
and there, within a yard
crowded with tripwire, burnt hoops, and drums,
the white flags of surrender have been dyed
the color of the banished government;
the purpose simple, obscenely so, within
the backstreet kitchen gardens of the slums-
here the film flutters, and the auditor
strains forward toward the cone of dirty light-
far back, behind an open outhouse door,
a child has pulled a rifle from a sack;
one of many such resistance men
chosen for the apparent unlikelihood
of their involvement with the underground;
and, looking backward, slips behind a fence
to gather from the air
the rifle's sharp report among the whistling
tiles and cisterns of a vacant bottling works.
The speeding of the motorcade beneath
the angels on the deep porches of the arch
is still somehow at odds
with the bright chill of that long-shadowed day,
as if the chromes and red insignia were bit
by acid in an otherwise faultlessly rolling screen.
The scholar, drawn by inclination, love,
and the necessities of his career,
has studied for some years
the media's creation of the war,
the instantaneous transmission of whose scenes
made terror commonplace
to millions in their homes; but a new sort
of terror; nickel-plated as it were
by the harsh irreality of the news,
that, crackling over the speakers in a voice
from heaven or the depots of Lorraine,
left the listeners soul-divided and unsure
amid the covered furniture and stoves.
It is the scholar's thesis that this world,
refracted as it was by plate and film,
gave birth, through stagings, acts, and newsreels, to
a second, mediated world of glass:
young idols posing in exotic dress
before a riot of grey dunes or waves;
brush-animated characters engrossed
by complicated labors of revenge,
the small-time metaphysics of their plots
reflected in the Xs of their eyes.
According to the scholar, this new world
grew heartless as the first, as it advanced
and labored in the space
it opened, desolate or not, to all.
Some years before the documentary
the West unknowingly mixed tragedy
and its lurid awareness of the same
when the Hindenburg burst suddenly into flame,
the edges of the canvas indistinct
through the fringe and kyrie of heated gas;
the skeleton frame, moored still to the ground
by a long chain arcing upward to a cloud,
an incandescent hive of wind-buffeted fire;
both those listening on the radio
and those below it on the ground
aware of just the slate vistas of the air-
and as a panicked voice called out the end
and the wind gusting past the microphone
took on the private resonance of dread,
a photographer bent to his camera, and took
an image that was seen throughout the world
as the craft fell, disintegrating, to rest
among the weeds and oil drums of Bayonne.
His pageantry already tarnished by
the unknown slaughter in the Berlin slums,
the fuhrer will soon step down from his car
and, whether due to his elation at the arch
or a hitch in the film rolling close by,
will dance that herky jerky step, his cap
of field-lieutenant's blue low on his brow;
and soon the world will once again relearn
how dangerous a simple joy can be,
as it takes in the image of this man
alone amidst his generals; head bowed
in thought above Napoleon's dark tomb.
Poetry from Agni, Web Issue 1