Lillian Vallee
These poems are all from a little chapbook entitled Erratics, that is, boulders moved by powerful geological forces and deposited far from their source.
At the core of my immigrant experience is simple awe at being alive. As a teenaged forced laborer in Germany, my mother survived the firebombing of Hamburg, and my father, who tried to flee his forced labor, ended up in a concentration camp. At the conclusion of hostilities, my parents were two young adults exhausted by war, so their first two children, my older brother and I, had to have transfusions. Our first sights were the rubble of Hamburg. My mother worked for the Red Cross and there learned how to knit us warm (and very scratchy) woolen clothes I can feel to this day, just as the kerosene smell of dock pilings arouses undercurrents of some inchoate grief.
My older brother occupies a strange place in my psyche. Somehow I have always felt that I was given the task of putting into words his vulnerability. He never says much, but occasionally he will share a story that leaves everyone dumbstruck, such as this one in “Adam in the New World.” My father was a gentle man with a great deal of self-control, so the story is not just about a boy’s wanting to be like everyone else but also about a father’s despair, perhaps even rage, at displacement and loss of identity. Many beautiful Polish names were first mangled then lost as children sought to fit in.
My father did not say much about his life, but my mother gave us her country in stories, so accurate I found out later, that I had a reliable map of her home town of Kolo on the Warta River in my head when I visited in the 1970s. My mother had been looking forward to secondary school when World War II broke out and disrupted her plans. Neither of my parents ever saw their families again.
Transfusion
When I was an infant, my mother tells me
My ear became infected, my brain inflamed
And the postwar blood of my Polish parents
Was too weak to repel the assault—
Something wanted me dead
Something small but powerful
They filled my veins with the blood
Of a German soldier whose views on the
Inferiority of the Slavic races remain unknown
Something wanted me alive
Something small but more powerful
Than whatever wanted me dead
Adam in the New World
My brother with the beautiful name of Waldemar
Name smelling of Baltic coasts, funeral pyres,
Saltmists and soaring terns, decided on his first
Day at a new school in Detroit that he would
Rechristen himself “Billy”; he was new to this
Third language but he knew his name was baggage
He was not strong enough to carry after his
Many migrations, so he dropped it, light as
A feather, like a crane colt molting
My father was a gentle man
My father was a defeated man
But he had tallied his losses
And bore them in silence—
The trees he had planted he
Would never see, the family so
Improvident; he was given no
Dominion over the birds of
The air; he would not name
The beasts in this new garden;
This world was mute, the animals
Stared back dumbly, without understanding.
The father walked this land of plenty
Without plenty, this land of peace
Without peace, this land of Anglo Saxon
Providence without it either.
All this he had borne and the silence
And the great fatigue of the assembly
Line and the children so bright, so
Burdensome. All this he could accept
Until the day his son Waldemar
Came home Billy.
O take away my country
O take away my innocence
O take away my grief
My joy, my vigorous days
But leave alone my children’s names
My children’s names must sing
My children’s names must sing their songs
Of sweet lost continents
My father, who was a gentle man,
Beat Billy until he remembered
He was Waldemar again
Until he took up the burden
The burden of his father’s name
Later he became Walter or Walt
As in Sir Walter Raleigh or Scott
Or even Walt Disney and Waldemar
Faded like sepia shots
Of a small boy
Standing before a large train
Promising to deliver him
From the ruins
Two Rivers, Fifty Years Apart
As we drove across the bridge
Over the San Joaquin
It reminds me, she said
Of my childhood river,
The Warta, in Poland
how it flooded every spring
the ice floes
Had to be dynamited
You could pick up
Stunned fish afterward
Trout or pike
And every so often
A haystack floated by
The fish were yours
For the taking, so I
Wrapped mine in my
Brand new winter coat
As a surprise
For my mother
She was not pleased
The year was 1939
And she knew
a war was coming
She had bought me
Several coats
In many sizes
As if preparation
Could fend off the worst
I remember how we celebrated
Two bridges built in Kolo in ‘38
Schoolgirls marched four abreast
And the entire town joined
The parade, the festivities
Imagine, people rejoicing in bridges
If only we had had another ten years
They were destroyed in ‘39
Why the Poles blew them up
I don’t know. The Germans
Were not coming that way
Later we had to cross the Warta
On pontoon and plank bridges
I was so afraid
The water seemed too close
I was so afraid
CR
Lillian Vallee, who earned degrees in English Literature abd Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, has published over 130 translations, articles, reviews, and poems, and has given more than 70 public talks and lectures. She is one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley, and the author of three chapbooks--Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow, which are tributes to the natural and cultural heritage of the Central Valley and to her own upbringing as the daughter of Polish immigrants.
