America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically.
—John Fowles
Prague, 1969
Torch #1 careens across the street towards the Museum,
his skin popping, the pain so intense
even bystanders feel their fingernails peel
and the voice in their spine scream
run
run
the flames a man
eating another man
as he fights to get out of the burning car
of himself before it explodes,
his lungs boiling and he falls
to be smothered, to be extinguished,
as a gold ring slips
from his skinless hand.
Křivoklát, 1952
When just ten years after Terezín
they hang Slansky
his father leaves for the country
and the little house along the Beroun
with the crooked door and crooked chair,
where the alchemist,
one-legged and desperate,
jumped from Emperor Rudolf’s
goldless dungeon,
and waits in the dark
for them to come get him
again,
their black Tatra gliding
along the ash-wet streets
like the alchemist’s ghost
come back to reclaim his orphaned shoe.
Kladno, 1948
A miner pries a small pebble of gold
from a seam in the rock
and keeps it
to himself.
Thus begins the worker’s paradise.
From this day forward
history is his fault. |
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A word from the poet about "Outside, It's America"
"Outside, It's America" began with the epigraph from John Fowles. I thought to myself, "I am an American, and I spend a lot of time thinking about gold metaphorically." So considering the challenge implied by Fowles' description of America and relying on some of my experiences in the Czech Republic & its history, I tried to sketch out something that suggested gold as an uneasy metaphor for freedom and its loss.
Torch #1 refers to Jan Palach, the Czech student who lit himself on fire in January of 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion of then Czechoslovakia. In flames, he staggered across several lanes of traffic, falling finally to the ground where he was extinguished. He lived four more days in agonizing pain. There were four more "torches" after Palach.
The second section was based on a friend's father, who survived the Holocaust & worked for the Czech Communist Party. In 1951, the Party purged its high-ranking Jews through the show trial of Rudolf Slansky, who was then executed. My friend's father went to his cabin in Krivoklat to wait for party officials to arrest him. The town sits beneath the medieval castle of Emperor Rudolf, famous as the prison of the alchemist Edward Kelley, who, failing to change lead to gold, attempted escape & lost his leg in the process.
Kladno is the birthplace of the Czech Communist Party and a coal mining area. The miners were a key force in the Party's early years. After the Party took power in 1948, many political prisoners were used as forced labor in the mine.
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