The Zone of Instability
In Labinot Mal, Albania,
where Ever Hoxha was born,
everyone
knows his last words:
I have protected you
with all my strength.
Unless he said: Don’t leave
sheet music praising the fruit
of my magnanimous deeds
anywhere near an anthill.
Or perhaps it was: Some perfectly
useless fool
left the stage door open.
In Labinot Mal, no one
wants to remember
the voluptuous black snake
shooting out from the base
of Enver Hoxha’s ten-foot
bronze statue
as it was removed.
In Labinot Mal, an old woman
worries: After my daughter’s gone,
who will watch over
the Supreme Comrade, helpless
on his back, out there
in the stable,
covered
with bird shit and straw?
[Enver Halil Hoxha, an Albanian communist politician, was the authoritarian ruler of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985.]
* * * * *
Bevy of Beauties Blacking Out: American History as Found in an Article from Life Magazine, May 12, 1961
One, two, three, four,
Scrape the make-up from the jar.
Five, six, seven, eight,
Slap the make-up on your face.
To these instructive words, the bevy of beauties applies blackening to their beatific White faces. The nearly full-page photo displays some of the seventy-three members of SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly), an organization of movieland housewives who put on an annual minstrel show to build a diagnostic clinic for retarded children, the anonymous reporter explains. Each ecstatic face a cup that runneth over. The fair ladies perform for a $100-a-couple audience, we learn, which includes the critical gaze of such awesome stars as Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, and Milton Berle. The show not only raised $150,000 but started a dandy guessing game — which pretty wife was under their smudgy disguise? To give us a small taste of the festivities, two photos follow of white-lipped ladies in straw boaters, white gloves, and blackface, rehearsing a cowgirl-style minstrel number. White-gloved hands playfully placed across their knees. Did they sing and strut to “Old Kentucky Home”? “Jump Jim Crow”? Or maybe “Massa’s in De Cold, Cold Ground”? What a historic loss that we don’t have a recording of the event.
Turn the page, and there’s The John Birch Society: Patriotic or Irresponsible, It Is Subject of Controversy, with a photo of ultra-Americans, who all happen to be White, saluting the American flag, hand on heart, in a Chicago living room. Each ecstatic fulsome face a cup that runneth over.
I’ll take this issue of Life out to the recycle bin and toss it in with the other detritus. No one will ever see this copy of the bevy of black-faced beauties again. Or is that exactly what you want of me, America?
* * * * *
This Wee Lock
“I shall never give you anything again that will be half so full of sunshine as this wee lock of hair, but I wish no hue more sombre might ever fall to you.”
– Emily Dickinson, letter to Emily Fowler Ford, a friend
You can now possess a lock of hair
that once might have been attached
to the head of Emily Dickinson
for $450,000 on eBay. The owner, Mark
Gallagher, bought the hair for $800
and hopes to use the profit
from the sale to pay off his massive college
loan debt, he says. The brown lock,
which resides in an envelope
labeled, in cursive, For Mrs. Dickinson,
was part of the estate sale for
J. D. McClatchy. After
the death of James Merrill, McClatchy
and a friend were going through
the belongings of Merrill’s
and came across an 1890 copy of Dickinson’s
poetry, the first published collection. Inside
the book, they found the yellowed
envelope with two locks of hair, one blonde
and one brown. Causing them to exclaim:
This is from Emily Dickinson’s head!
Their friend James Merrill loved to tell the story
how as an undergrad at Amherst College
he and two friends broke into
the home of Dickinson’s niece and stole a small
mirror, a sherry glass, and an envelope
containing, perhaps, Emily Dickinson’s
hair. In an interview in Poetry, Merrill claimed
he had borrowed and rescued the hair.
Though he also stated he had
gained clandestine entry to the house.
Stephen Yesner, Merrill’s literary executor,
often heard Merrill tell the tale.
Yesner and McClatchy both kept a snippet
of the two locks of hair. And now Gallagher,
a professor of English who teaches,
yes, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, offers
the buyer of the wee brown lock the chance
to be transported, farther than any
mere words on a page could ever arrange.