Cynthia Hogue

girl on the bridge (France 1944)

a stone bridge to where

over what?

the river so low I could’ve

walked across

walked on water walked on water:

it’s dark soon, Mother

where she was I didn’t know

I was alone wanting to

see lights

like fireflies sprinkling the fields at dusk

I was for my age small

no one saw me

or the danger they’d have said

I was in but I felt none

what was death to me I

hadn’t learned

I’d lost my way that was

all the scare

I’d ever had until the night sky turned day

I watched in wonder from the bridge

which was in a row with the other bridges

one by one – the aqueduct

the rail line

the road across – exploded

with loud noise

planes I couldn’t see bombs I could as they hit

the whole town different parts lighting up

like a carousel going round and round and round

Ars Poetica with Blank Page

If optimism is a species of hope,

I am an optimist of the blank page,

which fills with the thoughts

I hadn’t thought

to write down

until I sat down. 

Often I write nothing

that I would say.  In this way,                        

the page remains an occasion

to counter with frank

response the falsehoods

forced upon a country

as if full of thoughtless people

it’s assumed won’t notice.

I keep my peace in spite,

chew my nails in dissent,

feeling dumb as a cave,

but when I write I set aside a place

for the self-

evident to materialize

in eventual outcome,

an end ruthless to half-

ass, too-facile conclusion.

“Evident” shifts over time; once-

facts appall, presumptions

empty. Words formalized

in document do not change

but their context transforms.

I write to cleanse them,

discover them errant,

join the anguished company of truth-

tellers for life itself,

reckoning the stakes

are all-in

for harried earth and earth-beings.

I hold this space

hopeful, the blank page

I’ve filled while awaiting

God. God? Where did that come

from? I meant another

whispered word

I write to hear.

War Torn

They are called burned villages, those towns and hamlets burned to the ground during World War II. There are only a few such villages in France, but when one thinks about any war in history, burned villages are everywhere, embedded in the ground, in the feel, the soil of a place, in a people’s living memories and in their stories, at the molecular level in the air we breathe, and in the intensity generated by death and fire—fire power—turning a place where people lived in community together with their animals, their trees and gardens, before soldiers arrived and killed them, into a space where someone can, if she goes to the site, enter the chora, “the turbulent surface of the living ground on which or in which every thing is placed, imprinted, while this siting or placement remains always shaken and oscillating in the changes of the becoming.” So the philosopher Angus Fletcher describes the Platonic notion of the chora, the space bearing the imprint of the things and beings who once lived in that place.

In a time of war, the space people occupy until they can’t is war-torn. The chora is infused by war’s turbulence, which reaches out to disrupt, unsettle, all the delicate integuments of connections at levels both conscious and unconscious—the murmurings and rustlings and burgeonings of lives at levels animal, plant, and mineral—interrupted and changed. What does one see when she visits these sites? Seventy-five years later, the burned village I visited some time ago had been rebuilt, so I could see nothing of the place that had been except via photographs housed in the memorial museum and a documentary shown on the hour, which I happened upon and stayed to watch. In this way, losses in a chronologically distant but spatially proximate war, which had been abstract, historical, were individualized. I found myself feeling for strangers who lost their lives before I was born (as it happens, the year after and in the region where my husband was born). I felt viscerally what it means to “lose one’s life,” as if I understood that phrase for the first time. Millions upon millions upon millions of people thus.

My skin, my unconscious was also touched—immersed—in the resonance of the violence that had occurred on the site, as if it were a battlefield instead of a place where innocents were slaughtered. I walked through the chora on which death was imprinted. I touched a huge larch tree that had survived the fire, still giving shade and respite on a hot summer day. The nerves in my fingertips registered the vibrational frequency of the tree as I ran my hand over its bark. The tree had witnessed the killings. My mind’s edges touched the residue this violence had left. Perhaps such residue is what we mean when we say “I feel the spirits of those who died here” when we visit a battlefield, or one of the concentration camps, a site of slaughter. I didn’t say anything like that because in this instance I didn’t consciously feel anything walking through the rebuilt town, but when I got home,

I was violently ill. The condition lasted for days. What I said was, “I don’t feel well,” but I couldn’t articulate the nature of the feeling, that it was a world-sorrow.