Musings #35
ROUSING THE SLEEPING SERPENT
She hates showers –
not because the water is too hot
or too cold, or because all the steps
to cleanliness, once simple,
now overwhelm her.
After the war, she soaked
in hot baths, overflowing
with milky bubbles, luxuriated
in the slide of silk on skin
that kept bad dreams at bay.
She remembers none of this.
Slowly and in reverse,
like a lover undressing
a woman for the first time,
disease strips away
memory and function,
frontal lobes to stem.
What she does remember
had coiled, deep
and burrowed in the brain –
the shaving, the delicing showers,
the coarse striped uniforms they wore
laboring behind barbed wire.
And later, poison gas pouring down
from the overhead nozzles at Dachau,
and her parents’ upturned faces
as they struggled
not to breathe.
All this
–what her once-mind strove
to forget, to unsee–
unlocked
by that secret code, there,
snaked round her wrist –
that blue tattoo of numbers.