Opening Poems and Foreword Obscurity James Ragan for Jan Zajic (1950-1969), the second human torch to protest the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague There goes the night not knowing what it is seeing. A boy has cut his lip shaving and rinsed the basin free of blood his hand had salved into the mind for no thought in particular. At dawn he shot a heron. He must have forgiven the debt his teacher owed, perhaps, the promise of the moon above his head forever, or a noun his erratic tongue had failed to annunciate. He might have counted as redemption each lace of breath the girl had stroked into his wailing hair at St. Vitus Lake. He must have known. There ring the bells he must have known were saved at Tyn for Palach, for the first to run; the pact to torch imagination remembers only one, no matter what the name, what the home. He believed it is the found wisdom of an age not to forgive the sins of a nation, how the catacombs at Staré Mesto age with molding chalk of poets' bones. Here comes the imitator echoing stolen words. Here runs the conspirator across the cat heads of Karluv most, every rib of stone a memory of loss, a birth into the every tongue, saying there goes the wind not knowing what it is hearing. There crawls a leaf, a moon, and flames. There trips the clock's second hand, which every moment tumbles deeper into everywhere like a cough into a lung. There goes a noun, unpronounced, into obscurity. (The Hunger Wall (Grove, 1997)) (James Ragan has read for five heads of state, including Vaclav Havel, to whom his poem, "The Stone Steps to Hradcany," is dedicated. He is a contributing editor to the magazine. [Mesto takes a hacek over the 'e,' Tyn an acute accent over the 'y,' and Hradcany a hacek over the 'c.' Eds.]) ~ . ~ To A Czech Ear: Foreword by Viktor Tichy Considering the scope of the Prague poems, I am impressed by the thematic freedom James Ragan's students display in their writing. The language in a number of poems seems accomplished to my Czech ear, and certainly is very effective. I delight in Gannon Daniels's lines, such as: The stones have married themselves into one large tomb. . . . which house the birds that cup the cacophony in the dark canopy hovering us. . . . Because the young Jewish boys chant their long curls into circles, their eyes . . . the voice of when repeats and repeats to crescendo linking the limitless with the passing. Katherine Goodman's poem, "Transported," is too powerful as a whole to be dissected. Now my blood chants, but for oceans and years, my friend, my friend, I would have forsaken you. And David Joseph's painterly poem ["At the Old Missile Site"] appeals to my artist's eye. Now the daisies are flushed with yellow, and the hills roll perfectly down to the water. But somewhere out on the backbone trail, just past Sullivan Canyon, a mountain lion crawls up California's bent leg, stands poised, remembers. The New York editors asked for one of my newer poems with relevance to Prague, so I offer here an irreverent historical fiction. -- VT From the Gospel of Magdalene to Apotheosis Viktor Tichy Johan is born on the first floor of a Romanesque palace on the highest hill in Prague. Suckled by one of the maids, he sees his mother every Sunday in church. He is taught obedience the way of the cross by an overripe Jesuit who smells from across the street. The boy sees faces in crumpled parchment, warped smiles in cumulus clouds, tresses of women in the marble pattern winding throughout the palace floors. The church sees God as an old man, white hair and beard flowing in the interstellar gas, Adam's pink flesh and pubic hair squeezing out of clay between God's fingers. All else is heresy, Johan says to his maid, as he contemplates the divine shape of her genitalia. Every three years, the old man comes home from a crusade wearing the wire hood of his shirt between one steel eye and steel helmet. He unlocks his wife's chastity belt before he takes off the sword. It had to be opened without his key, gossips the blacksmith's daughter, three times to give birth. The cinnamon cobblestones under Johan's feet, called 'mare heads' in Czech, are big enough to bury his father's dog. They have been polished by the hooves of centuries into pebble smooth loaves. White and violet lilacs creep above the eves of tiny houses stuccoed with ochre and lime. In places where slate shingles splatter the sky over the mare heads, peeled lime-and-sand flesh exposes the bones of rough stone. Like strands of earth color beads, the dwellings of blacksmiths and masons chain under the palace that reeks with the conception of kings buried long before the New World was new. The Roman roof tiles sag massive purlins the way armor twists the spines of kinglets and knightlings. What weight the maids have to bear to prepare an annual bath for the family when every cup of water has to be carried from the well on the square. Commodes of teak inlaid with ivory are emptied out of the windows on mare heads, powdered wigs, helmets, and dogs. The plagues and confessions punctuate the wars outlasting generations when the sky is yellow as beer. The masons build chapels out of skulls; the happiest are the gargoyles and the dead. Before Johan is tall enough to swing his father's sword, his mother and sisters are raped and killed by Prussian soldiers in one of the wars, and he is fed alive to the seminary. As he reads the gospel of Mary Magdalene, his knowledge of Christ becomes too intimate to be tolerated by the local Bishop. After an eternity of fasting and self-whipping for watching a maid in bath, he is burned on the square with the wood of lilacs, the inquisition his only heir. His misplaced finger bone and two molars are auctioned off to a princeling to be set as holy relics with ivory and pearls in a gold monstrance and coronation mace. Could this be witchcraft? The young maid looks at her newborn as she contemplates the divine shape of his lips joined to the areola of her breast. Johan's face half smiles from the crumpled parchment, his warped lips exhale cumulus clouds, tresses of his mother and sisters wind in the pattern of the palace floors. (Viktor Tichy, then age 17, was imprisoned when the Soviets invaded Prague in 1968. Now living in Iowa, he is a contributing editor to the magazine's special section, Bridge City Lit/Prague.)