March 4, 2023

Andrea Hollander

FIELD HOSPITAL

Southern France, 1945

What young men won’t do, my father wondered,
scalpel in hand, his army drabs stained red,
catching his breath beneath his surgeon’s mask,
peering again into the body of this boy
he guesses joined up like all the rest:
to prove something. And my father’s task
of cutting—cutting through tissue
and bone, using everything he’s learned.
War is war, of course. He knows that.
His job: to keep these boys alive,
even the Germans, to cut past
gangrened flesh. Afterwards
the intricate suturing, the mangled
limbs removed from the antiseptic table
by someone else. How he’s able
to do this, hour after hour, one body
becoming another, he doesn’t know.

He thinks of this now in Brooklyn
walking down Court Street to the barber
past all the specialty shops—cheese wheels
from France, barrels of pickles,
salmon and mussels on racks of ice,
rabbit carcasses, their skins removed,
hanging above displays of liver and chops.
Against his will the smell and the sound
of the saw he always had to use,
the feel of it, and in his arm the ache.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Andrea Hollander: “During the wars that have occurred in my lifetime, I have found myself dwelling on my father’s wartime experiences in France, where he served in the surgical unit of an American army field hospital. After the war, my mother, who had not seen him for more than two years, joined him, and that’s when (and where) I was conceived. I credit Dad, who was a lover of poetry, for my own passion for it.” (web)

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March 3, 2011

Andrea Hollander

DELTA FLIGHT 1152

After the first drink, you can be
what you’re not. It’s so easy, all you must do

is answer this man’s questions with truths
you’ve just invented–on my way to the annual meeting

of master magicians, or to a conference of physicists
or international bankers–and your life is enviable,

new. Tell him you’re sad because you’re on your way
to your sister’s wedding and you’re in love

with her fiancé. Wipe your eyes,
sigh, mention almost under your breath the baby

you had to give up, the job. You’re the one
who introduced them, you couldn’t stop yourself, he would come

to your desk at the office. How lonely he was,
how young. But if you reveal the afternoon

of lunch on the rooftop, how for you
it wasn’t enough, there’s certain danger

this man, his drink finished, ice diluted
in the bottom of his plastic cup, will lean too far

into your invented life. He’ll offer his handkerchief.
You’ll finger his embroidered initials. He’ll touch your arm,

hand you his card. His voice unsteady,
he’ll tell you to call him at home–you,

an only child on her way
to see the ocean for the first time. You, who have managed

to live a moral life, whose troubled heart has never
surrendered, now with your wild and dangerous

lies, you could turn toward this stranger
and open.

from Rattle #18, Winter 2002

__________

Andrea Hollander: “I’ve come to believe that in order to matter, poems must be both entertaining and useful—entertaining by being rooted in the human traditions of telling stories and making music; useful by disturbing our lives enough to reinforce our humanness. These are the kinds of poems I endeavor to write.” (website)

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