`The Anxiety of Language'

I found this poem, “November 22, 1963,” by Karl Kirchwey, too late to post it last Wednesday, the 43rd anniversary of President Kennedy’s killing. Kirchwey is four years my junior but we seem to recall the events of that long weekend with newsreel vividness. I was a sixth-grade crossing guard, wearing a yellow Sam Browne belt and standing at my post, flag in hand, when a driver stopped to say the president had been shot. Soon, another driver reported Kennedy had been touring a nut house in Texas when one of the nuts shot him. How odd that a surreally attenuated rumor should ring with poetic truth. Here’s Kirchwey’s poem:

“I was sitting in an empty classroom,
having already been held back one grade,
and I was writing, the anxiety
of language upon me, experience
now and then breaking through the linked dance of
symbols, as if somebody had just come
into the room with a news bulletin
from the radio, events far away.

“In the south the way was clear,
past the Adolphus Hotel,
Thomsen Furniture Mart, the
First National Bank, Walgreen
Drugs, the windows and signs of
an idea: twenty dollars
and seventy-eight cents for
a Mannlicher-Carcano.

“Above the blackboard, proper examples
of cursive script flew away on birds’ wings,
and my hand learned to trap something inside,
though I did not understand what, just as
I ran out under the long school porch that
Friday afternoon, sent home early, a
Sense of jubilee in my heart because
Something extraordinary had happened.

“Her pink suit with its black trim
was like a burned rose, or the
exclamation of brain mist
on the pavement as he grew
heavier and heavier
in her arms, and time seemed to
stand still. Through the live oak leaves,
pigeons rose, wheeled and scattered.

“Somehow I have come to live in the world
by means of certain days and events I
no longer recall, except sometimes in
fugitive traces of exultation
or shame. Certain kinds of knowledge are
intolerable, I know this now, though
history contrives, by tutelary
shapes, looped, moving ahead, to draw us on.

“Scott-Foresman Rolling Readers,
ten to a box, and the smell
of dust prickling his nostrils
like the first day of school. He
curled himself around absence
and closed his fingers gently
in the late November light
till it begot more absence.”

I like the way Kirchwey blurs memory. Further, I like the way he blurs identities, shifting Oswald’s with his 7-year-old self’s. Kirchwey gets the Dallas landmarks right, the make and cost of the rifle Oswald used (though, oddly, he omits the full price Oswald paid, $19.95, which included the cost of the scope), and the books in the boxes Oswald moved on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The poem deals less with the assassination – it is not a documentary, despite the details – than with memory and forgetfulness, and the way they impel writing: “I was writing, the anxiety/of language upon me, experience/now and then breaking through the linked dance of/symbols.”

Kirchwey writes that “Certain kinds of knowledge are/intolerable,” though the absence of such knowledge goads us in ways that remain forever powerful and obscure. That line reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s description of seawater in one of her greatest poems, “At the Fishhouses”:

“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.”