Book Burning
Rogoff, Jay
Poem Book Burning Fire loves paper but adores people. Fire eats our words, hurling them off like flaming birds on bright black wings. Smoke must cough but fire sings, breathing...
...We walk through flame, daring hell and high water, dancing and burning, our fancy fired up till real tears drop...
...Smoke must cough but fire sings, breathing deeper, sucking down our oxygen...
...The boys pledge death divinest respect with courage to burn, courage to burn Freud and all joy, such men as Mann, heretic Einstein, and Heine the Jew...
...Goebbels commends their courage to break the intellectual reich of the Jew and homosexual...
...and face the blaze, courage to erect in this vast empty platz, banal and funereal, a tower of books and feed them to fire like so many faggots...
...The night of the fire on Unter den Linden what rang up the curtain next door at the Staatsoper...
...They view the night turned day, the spring turned hell this early May night...
...The opera disgorges its lovers, their eyes still moist, songs still in their teeth...
...Poem Book Burning Fire loves paper but adores people...
...Die Zauberflöte, its gorgeous noise lit with love, a book of seduction, light, and learning...
...it guzzles the broth, consumes the table...
...For now, bringing brightness, words of all people soar in a tower, the babble of languages melting together, the fire-breathing steeple drunk on air and publishing ash, singing like mad a single song in a single tongue...
...The burning covers issue a smell like living leather, rank with authors...
...The spines crack...
...Jay Rogoff Jay Rogoff is the author of “How We Came to Stand on That Shore” and “The Cutoff...
...Another decade and they’ll take burning to the very Beginning, the primal Word, spinning the world back down the commode, back into its Chaos of mud and scheiss...
...Fire is not our brother’s keeper...
...Kerchiefs mask noses and hands shield eyes raised to the skies...
...It isn’t a question of good and evil...
...He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he teaches at Skidmore College...
...or Tristan and Isolde, romantic hell Book Burning on a Celtic ship, love mating death till both look the same...
...On the Opernplatz the students wave a sea of dark arms engaged by armbands and oozing the spume of cream-pale hands awash in the air...
...Fire crests the wave of the blood-dark ocean, extinguished breath blood-wet with kisses: lovers, poison, and none left to blame...
...Heine guessed a modern truth: they burn books first...
Vol. 68 • January 2004 • No. 1
