Jew on Bridge
C. K. Williams
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Raskolnikov hasn’t slept. For days. In his brain, something like white.
A wave stopped in mid-leap. Thick, slow, white. Or maybe it’s brain.
Brain in his brain. Old woman’s brain on the filthy floor of his brain.
His destiny’s closing in. He’s on his way, we’re given to think, though
he’ll have to go first through much suffering, to punishment, then redemption.
Love, too. Punishment, love, redemption; it’s all mixed up in his brain.
Can’t I go back to my garret, to my filthy oil-cloth couch, and just sleep?
That squalid neighborhood where he lived. I was there. Whores, beggars,
derelict men with flattened noses: the police break their noses on purpose.
Poor crumpled things. He can’t, though, go back to his filthy garret.
Rather this fitful perambulation. Now we come to a bridge on the Neva.
Could you see the sea from there then? I think I saw it from there.
Then, on the bridge, hanging out of the plot like an arm from a car,
no more function than that in the plot, car, window, arm, even less,
there, on the bridge, purposeless, plotless, not even a couch of his own: Jew.
On page something or other, chapter something, Raskolnikov sees JEW.
And takes a moment, a break, you might say, from his plot, from his fate,
his doom, to hate him, the Jew, loathe, despise, want him not there.
Jew. Not as in Chekhov’s ensemble of Jews wailing for a wedding.
Not Chekhov, dear Chekhov. Dostoevsky instead, whom I esteemed
beyond almost all who ever scraped with a pen, but who won’t give the Jew,
miserable Jew, the right to be short, tall, thin or fat Jew: just Jew.
Something to distract you from your shuttering tunnel of fate, your memory,
consciousness, loathing, self-loathing, knowing the slug you are.
What’s the Jew doing anyway on that bridge on the beautiful Neva?
Maybe he’s Paul, as in Celan. Antschel-Celan, who went over the rail of a bridge.
Oh my Todesfuge, Celan is thinking. The river’s not the Neva, but the Seine.
It’s the bridge on the Seine where Jew-poet Celan is preparing himself.
My Deathfugue. My black milk of daybreak. Death-master from Germany.
Dein goldenes Haar Marguerite. Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith. Aschenes-Antschel.
Was it sunrise, too, as when Raskolnikov, sleepless, was crossing his bridge?
Perhaps sleepless is why Raskolnikov hates this Jew, this Celan, this Antschel.
If not, maybe he’d love him. Won’t he love the prisoners in his camp?
