Sunday poetry: "January"

The great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick reportedly had reservations about Schindler's List. According to a biographer, when asked about Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winner, Kubrick replied, "Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t."

That's a glib way of looking at it. But as I keep encountering the Holocaust in recent days -- as I prepare to teach Leon Leyson's The Boy on the Wooden Box to the 8th grade, as my school took a field trip last November to the Museum of Tolerance, as the media reports new surges of antisemitism around the world -- the word "success" seems appropriate in a way. The quote many people remember from Schindler's List is the Talmudic saying "He who saves one life saves the world entire." Life is a messy business, full of disillusionment and frustration and compromise, but we cherish the saving of it. Leyson, who was 15 when the Holocaust ended, went on to live in Southern California, teach high school, and embark on public speaking tours. He died in 2013 at the age of 83, of what we might euphemistically call natural causes. More specifically, he died after a four-year battle with lymphoma, but that disease was not induced by the Nazis. Leysen, born the same year as Anne Frank, was able to live out his life until his body declared the end. Stanley Kubrick would call that success. I would too.

I don't know how long I am going to live. I don't know the same about my daughter, who is seven. We use the term "life expectancy" to estimate how long our bodies have, but no one is born with a clock that counts down to a specific date. I have sometimes wondered, very seriously, how different our habits would be if we did. What we can do is toss out numbers and declare them our idea of when old age begins. Seventy, perhaps -- when Simon and Garfunkel were young men, they sang that it seemed "terribly strange" to live that long. We might put our finger on eighty, although many of our current politicians seem to shrug that number off. Ninety? Clint Eastwood is still making movies. Numbers become irrelevant. All I know is that my daughter is due a long time on Earth -- every indication points to that -- and I will not stand for her having anything less. Neither would all the doctors, nurses, firefighters, crossing guards, and others who dedicate their lives to preserving the lives of others. True, death is inevitable, and it is always an occasion for sorrow, but to die naturally is wistful, not tragic. Case in point: A year and a half ago, the Global News reported a story about a Schindler's list survivor celebrating his 100th birthday, and it noted that only six people on the list are still alive. Did you know that? Probably not. We cringe at what might have happened in 1945, and now are content to let biology run its course.

My poem featured this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "January," is about two people who have put themselves in biology's hands. Are they Holocaust survivors? We have no idea; the poem never identifies them. The speaker is a man, the poem's addressee a woman -- presumably his wife. She is old. They both sense that she is dying. The speaker begins with the words "(I know) I'm losing you" -- parentheses appear four times in the poem, with the word "know" in three of them. She has visions of her death ("dreams about ascending") and murmurs about them to her partner. Clearly, he accepts the situation. Both of them are still alive for the time being; perhaps they have weeks left together, perhaps months, perhaps years. It is January, a new year, and sounds of activity still roar in the snow outside their window. He studies her as she studies herself, naked in the mirror, chest hanging unromantically and fingers laced through gray hair. Perhaps he still finds her alluring. Perhaps he is simply intrigued by the aging process; with the right detachment, we can find any part of our lives compelling. He holds onto the memories of their younger days ("two waists entwined on a couch / red-eyed / the floor scattered with a younger man’s shoes"), but they are not so much mourned as acknowledged as another obvious fact.

Is that what it comes down to, finally? Well, yes. It's what parents hope for as they first lay eyes on a newborn, what a lifeguard envisions as he fishes a flailing six-year-old out of the water. We have probably all raised a glass at some point and wished someone a long life. A long life is not always pretty, but it is just. Anyone who bemoans the sight of a loved one aging must consider the alternative. "January" is about two people who, for lack of a better word, have succeeded -- a feat that the daily headlines remind us is denied to countless people. The poem does not tell a proper story and has no real ending. Perhaps the poem is an ending itself. If it is not a happy one, then what would a happy one be?