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Artwork: Learning to Fly by Will Jacques

G as in --- Robot, An Un-fairy Tale
Marilyn Jurich

Of course, accept the fairies, leprechauns,
and elves, even trolls.
I like the G folk best – maybe as homage
to Gulliver and Grimm. Though let’s be clear,
all these creatures, their special features,
devised, revised by who we are.

Take Ghost – we didn’t want death to be so
FINAL. Take Grendel – “primordial” human,
deprived of selfhood, struggled to belong.
Gnome had his position as guardian of earth.
Genie – the apogee of human desire.
If sometimes grotesque, the gargoyle – protector.

Golem, incanted and ordained, saved Jews from
pogroms, persecution. “Ghost Dance savior,” Wovoka,
prophesied a world of peace – the dead joined with
the living, all tribes united. Peace.

The Robot threatens humankind under guise of
technology, productivity, speed –
all that gives us ease. Assures our absence from
ourselves and one another

Robot cat purrs “love” on grandma’s lap.
GPS more accurate than Aladdin’s flying carpet.
All magic outdated – it’s silicon we trust,
adore; digital delights that ease; destroy.

The robot – wizard, druid, wunderkind – wins
at chess, swims the blood stream, flies wherever.
Someday she / he emerges Genghis Khan, Leviathan,
Czar, Dragon of the Apocalypse. Where are you,
St. George? (Drones would nuke him anyhow.)
What password, algorithm overcomes?

Drs. Strangelove at each door, each window in the sky,
beneath the earth. Humans turning, turning . . .
robot progeny. Call the Golem. Seek the Shaman.
Research the password in the Kabbalah.
Houyhnhnms must know the code.
Gretel has the chuspah –
                                                                 Do you?

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Permutations on an Uncertain Theme
Marilyn Jurich

Boston Museum of Fine Arts, July 2, 2017
Botticelli, Photographs of the Lodz Ghetto

There were no saints, no John the Baptist, no angels
to assure the child a sacred death
as divined by God.
There was no one to comfort or assure;
console the victims in the sanctity of their deaths.
No one to lament their “last.”
There was no God in sense or sight, only
the curse of permanent night – the not to be
(have been) ever.
What to retrieve?
Life Death both zero. No human a hero.
A species defeated, debased by –
how shall we say? – its own Creator.

Massive lines of deportees – faces gaunt,
bodies thrust into continuous march.
“Yid” infants, toddlers tumbled into a puny cart,
arms flailing, legs askew, animals to market.

Downstairs
Baby Christ fondled by his radiant mother –
each foreseeing separation, holds against the pain. What visions of betrayal and martyrdom?
And yet, God ordains and God will save.

This Saturday I’ve come here out of vague need –
Botticelli consoles, his harmonies of the human soul.
Once again, I scent old Venetian churches,
terraced landscapes of Perugia.
Glimpse Poland, also, in “Photographs of Lodz” –
find a piece of my father’s birthplace.

Antiphonies – heart-brain wrenching – these photographs of
Ross. Drooped bodies of soon-deported souls.
No Poland, only memories of people who might
have lived a life.

Why do I desire, resent the beauties in Botticelli?
Must be that Absence is still by my side.

XXX
No sense I had of how factual documentary can wrestle heart and brain.
                        No awareness of how synchronicity transforms
                        what we know and who we are.

Voices -- questions that arise in the observer
from how the artists execute, how they transform
a ”known.” Here the complexion of the virgin,
there, the drooping coats of deported souls.
I see others here who observe, hear comment on
Botticelli’s “devotion” or Henryk Ross’s “stagecraft.”

I am disturbed, of course, by human malice;
disturbed for the antiphony -- how Ross
reproves Botticelli; yet Botticelli succeeds
Centuries irrelevant; only what art makes clear.

Of course, they are each right; each struggles
with my problem: how survive in a world
where love is overcast with pain.
depict . . . and yet,
          their visual forms, my verbal murmurings
          require others to find different “slants”;
          try once more to comprehend; try at
          truth which -- it is true – depends on
          a creative beauty, even the beauty of woe.

A dialogue through which we discover ourselves –
beauty a means of contrasting many truths,
disturbing an easy content.


******************************************************************************

His "Exquisite Corpse"
Marilyn Jurich

Prologue:
Recent Poster in New England Library:
Join us for a coffee and dessert at the new
“Death Café” where we will all converse on
that subject – especially valuable for
seniors. All others welcome.

The irony / paradox of name – Hyman from Hebrew Chayim
meaning LIFE. Middle name Zimmerman constructed from
zimmer in German meaning room or chamber. Last, the English
word Bloom which resounds as a hopeful vision - glorious,
luminescent. Oh yes, he was a true believer, erstwhile rabbi.
Desired to express the infinite; thus, “Exquisite Corpse.”

Everywhere death, what had been – entrails of earth;
cadavers with all their intricacies - heaps and tangles
in assorted splotches of green, red, brown, purple –
the whole portfolio of color. Could be xylem, phloem, a vein,
striation of a muscle. Oh, there a leg. Mish-mash of leaves,
microbes, maybe mitochondria. Sometimes delicate
fibrils, sometimes dense whorls of … what to know?

B’s art called “surreal” – to me, a perpetual Yom Kippur
seasoned with Halloween. Does he dissect a heaven
where there is no soul? Do all the anatomies confirm in
their variety the power of God? Yet, all a bloody mess -
nothing breathes. Bloom lived till ninety-six.
I will be eighty-seven as I write this poem;
and prefer to breathe and others to have breath.

Oh, here is one still alive. Am I she or is she me?
“Beware,” I think, and stay and stare. Angry, sad,
                                              afraid.

Imagine the primal mother / earth goddess heaped
in stone. Consider the Venus figure at Willendorf,
massive, rigid sans human feature. Blobs of
abdomen, slobbering breasts – empty bags, no
nipples. Vacant udders. Below a faint bruised splotch,
labia dwindled. Bloom’s female, thus. Old woman
slouched in an arm chair, fierce to keep up life,

Mouth a scowl, toothless within. Musty hairs
sulk from each side of face. Eyes slits within
pouches – and listless. Yet, the woman a fist of
desperate resolve.

Not a single tender shred, glean of human
“ken” in this being as Bloom would depict.
Merely an instrument of life, purpose at end.

What blessing here?
What brokhe?
                                           J’accuse. Resist.

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