I speak from the grave. No surprise--
my onscreen voice, a kind
of tremolo, mimicked
inevitability, as preordained
as maggots devouring the brains
of corpses left in the sun, horses,
say, or soldiers. The Nazis
who hounded us from Berlin—
me, born Laszlo Lowenstein,
my friend Brecht, all the others—
specialized in the swarming life
of corpses. I learned to speak
from the maggot in me,
from that cellar where the intruder
in your dream drags a casket
over the damp stone floor.
When I swallowed arsenic
in the blackest of comedies,
outwitted by two-faced crones,
my last words were as whiny
and insinuating as our temptation
to the death wish. Even the child
I murdered in M wanted it
a little. As a boy I was drawn
to foetid wells, pits and depressions,
fascinated by nightcrawlers
pulling themselves apart, segments
going separate ways to inch
through leaf-slime, burrow slow-motion
into the dampness of the European earth.
Soon enough, the continent ripped apart,
and I abandoned one life
for the grand illusion of American
movies, kingdom of the ersatz,
good glorified, bad smashed,
thank you, Mr. Moto. But even
as I sent myself up, comedic
half-man, half-raven,
I had moments watching the rushes,
close-ups of frightened eyes,
moist, soulful, globular,
when even I felt strangely sympathetic
to the evil, vulnerable creature
acting from that gnome-like body
which guarded, as if it were deep
beneath the screen, such dark treasure.

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F.W. "Skip" Renker's poems have appeared in many small press and online magazines (most recently, Triplopia, Poetry Superhighway, and Temenos), as well as several anthologies. He's a Pushcart Prize nominee who has published two chapbooks, Birds of Passage (Delta Press), and Sifting the Visible (Mayapple Press). He teaches English and meditation classes at Delta College in Michigan's Saginaw Valley.
E-mail: fwrenker at delta dot edu
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kaleidowhirl  |  spring 2007