Two Short Films of My Father

For Ellen Bryant Voigt

.

I. Liberation of Stalag Luft One: Barthes, Germany, 1945

Like any lyric, nothing happens;
a core fueled by something outside
the interminable moment—lines
of soldiers filing without origin,
that slow parade of boyish smokers
trudging rags of mismatched uniforms
and smirks toward but not into
the flank of a waiting plane. I trust
he is among them, have to watch
with the sort of faith his parents
mustered poring over censored
letters, longing between the lines,
bored evocations of boredom: he was
alive, but wasn’t free. And we
never see them board the plane.
Like any narrative, it must be followed
for the purpose of learning what happens,
because something does. It has
already, yet it never can.

.

II. En Route, Olympic Games: London, 1948

Whoever aims the camera struggles
to keep the horizon level. The ship
pitches, rights itself like the world
in which they’ve lived, a liner’s cargo
of nervous men in uniform going
overseas again. Scripted calisthenics
on the deck above the silent bow-
wave of black, hull-peeled water.
Cigarettes, self-conscious chatting,
elbows on the gleaming brightwork,
bangs lifting. And there, swinging
around his neck, the religious medal
he wore throughout the war and after.
In the tropics they told him to leave it
on the beach; flashing, it would only
lure the barracudas to his throat.
Though I didn’t believe in the power
of its little saint I always
wanted one like it, silver pendant
to chafe the chests of all my tees,
wear holes my mother, in disgust,
would widen with her finger folding
laundry on their bed. A talisman
that might keep me from drowning,
or at least catch light through water
while I swam, like him, from shore.