One Poem by George Vance

 

Stumbled-upon poem: November 5, 2010, walking around a Paris quarter

 

Happening onto the Anne Frank Garden

I see a yellow-walled buildingback     

a rectangle of blue sky mirrored in a window

an undefined dark stain

a yellowed bedcover drooping from a second window

beyond, utility boxes on the roof of the Pompidou Center

a tunnelled trellis in the form of a semi-ellipse

climbing plants on the walls behind

1 concrete and 2 wooden  benches

I finish my pain d’olives on one of them

to the right on an upper floor of the Musée de la Poupée

a woman is painting a yellow windowframe

the buildings are all yellow as is the back facade of the

Hotel Saint-Aignan many of whose occupants were deported in

the same circumstances as was Anne Frank

this building now houses the Museum of Jewish Art and History

from which I have just come after viewing an exhibition of

paintings by Félix Nussbaum who took the last train from Belgium to Auschwitz

a graft of the chestnut tree that Anne Frank could see through the window of

her hiding-place in Amsterdam grows next to the entrance of this garden

its leaves are yellow

children play in another garden just behind

next to the graft of Anne Frank’s chestnut tree a rag-piled figure lies apparently sleeping

on a bench

across from this figure sits another in an attitude of frozen prayer

a group of men come, point, talk, leave

 

the show window of the nearby Doll Museum is decked with antique Santa Clauses, two

young dollgirls in red dresses, and a woman in her corsetry posed under a Christmas tree

a late painting by Félix Nussbaum depicts a pair of humans as articulated dolls

he spent the 30’s unconsciously and evermore intensely prefiguring what would happen in

the death camps and while living on the margins of Europe’s cities never strayed far beyond

the reach of the Nazi net; his parents, living in Switzerland, returned to the fatherland

 

Anne Frank’s chestnut tree, severely diseased, was fitted with a metal frame in April 2008

around the curve of the passage leading to the garden is a gallery sporting vaginas

and penises attached to anguished human forms fondling themselves and each other

 

when Hitler came to power Nussbaum’s compatriot, an industrial designer named Hans Bellmer, swore never to work for the state again

he began to draw and construct life-size dolls of women and young girls in ambiguously concupiscent poses, deformed figures  mocking the ideal of the perfect Aryan body

one illustration is of a seated doll-like girl with members made of a loaf of bread, a milk jug, and a table leg

his own and critics’ remarks include phrases like “the confusion of the perverse and the banal”; “an amalgamation of organic and inorganic”; “the physical unconscious”

he wrote works entitled ‘Doll. Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor’; ‘Notes

on the Subject of the Ball-Joint’; he wanted to ‘create an artificial girl with anatomic possi-

bilities...capable of re-creating the heights of passion, even to inventing new desires’

Bellmer was welcomed by the automata-loving surrealists   and included in the Nazi’s list of ‘degenerate artists’

not being Jewish he finished the war in a French prison camp

 

I once dramatized the death scene in the bunker; when Hitler falls he doesn’t strike the floor

but is suspended on wires that ascend and disappear above the stage

I begin to understand what I meant

 

the chestnut tree in Anne Frank’s hide-out garden was finally felled by a storm August 23, 2010

 

I briefly dated a young girl in the 50’s; at the time people said ‘they’ didn’t want to mix

with ‘us’; this was not clear to me; I try to imagine her being herded into a railroad car

 

the Pompidou Center would not yet exist without the intervention of the Second World War

industry would have continued to proliferate but it would have taken many more decades

for us to feel impelled to expose the guts of things on the outside

George Vance. Reims, France. Author of A Short Circuit & Xmas Collage, from corrupt press . Has read at Paris venues – IVY, Poets Live, Live Poets, Wice. Published in Upstairs at Duroc, Bastille, on-line mags Nth dgree, RETORT, EKLEKSOPEDIA. His video ‘Heights of Experience’ was presented in Brussels as part of ARTCETERA, and (In)(de)finite Gist was presented at the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference.

'Stumbled upon...' appeared in on-line magazine Retort, now off-line.