From "Song of Songs" (8 sessions with Dr. Solomon).

Love is strong as death
Craving as the grave

The following is an excerpt from The Book of Anna, a series of long narrative poems interspersed with prose diary entries written in the voice of a fictional poet, Anna Ach Asher. Asher, a Czech-German Jewish concentration camp survivor, is writing in mid-'50s Prague. Asher's mother was a concert pianist, and was killed in a separate camp, after mutilation of her hands; her father abandoned the family when she was young. The poems of The Book of Anna subject voices from many strata of Jewish experience to the emotional and theological acid bath of the Holocaust. In "Song of Songs," a poem written as a sequence of eight therapy sessions between Asher and a psychoanalyst named Dr. Solomon, Asher rewrites the Biblical Song of Songs and its traditional rabbinic interpretations to tell the story of three older Jewish women who gave their lives to ensure that Asher, then a 15-year-old girl, would survive the camps. The sensuous imagery Asher quotes simultaneously expresses her love for those women, her rage at the God she sees as having not only permitted but enjoyed their deaths, and her resistance to the therapeutic perspective (she calls it "consciousness macht frei") represented by her psychoanalyst. In recounting the attempts of the women--a prostitute, a physicist and a rebbetzin (a rabbi's wife)--to make sense of the camps and to instill in her a desire to survive them, Asher x-rays the values each represents.

FIRST SESSION

Yes Dr., the same dream, the harem
Bags of myrrh between their breasts
Henna tattoos on their wrists

The terminally noble
Daughters of Barracks 10
Who made the suicide pact

To husband me as their--

Their vineyard, Dr.
Their designated fruit; the shoot
They'd plant beyond the camps.

He must be here they murmur. His scent is growing stronger.

The Rebbetzin trembles like a veil;
The Physicist giggles;
The Whore straightens her hem.

It's a tense moment, Dr.
God returning to the harem
To kiss us with the kisses of His mouth

Stud us with gold shower us with silver
Lay us on couches of leaves
Between panels of cypresses ...

The Rebbetzin was right: the Whore

Was a dangerous influence.
The others shunned her;
With me, she could reminisce--

Soft Jewish boys, firemen, lawyers; grandfathers
With whiskey on their breath.
A living, Dr.

No guns no boots;
Just small dark rooms,
Need and nakedness.

After every tete a tete
The Rebbetzin would mutter supplications
To shield me--she was serious Dr.--

From growing up like that.

Is this too much for a first session?
You're looking a little pale.
Your predecessor accused me of using his office
To violate the dead.

He was no Solomon, Dr.
It isn't that easy to violate
Daughters of Barracks 10.

In your professional opinion, Dr.,
How much do I owe them?
For the Physicist, a skeptical smile?

Kinder for the Rebbetzin?
For the Whore, a steady job
And steadier diet of men?

And for the King whose Name is like perfume, unspeakably intimate,

Who has brought me to your couch
To recount what the Rebbetzin called
His "merciful deliverance?"

Where was I oh yes
The dream the harem myrrh
The footfalls of His Nibs.

I take my place
Between Whore and Rebbetzin
Blink and have no lids

My jaws keep moving
The chant goes on
But my mouth is full of flesh;

I'm eating my way
Across a face
Familiar, immense--

No hands no skin hidden wings
A sweet-tooth
For the dead--

A scarab-beetle; yes.
Uncanny Dr.
A truly inspired guess.

Black but comely,
Part Rebbetzin, part Whore,
Consummate Physicist,

Living tribute, Dr.,
To the daughters of Barracks 10.
Return--isn't that the term?--

Return on their investment.

"How can you hide from what never goes away?"

No, Dr., not Heraclitus;
I'm quoting the Rebbetzin.
The Physicist loved

To needle her in the dark, after last inspection.
God-this, God-that,
Sotto voce blasphemies

That had us all in stitches.

Usually the Rebbetzin obliged
By begging Heaven to forgive
"A soul"--this was before the bricks, of course;

Count it as prophetic--

"A soul made foolish by torment."
The Whore would snicker, "Quick, or He'll sentence her
To a concentration camp,"

The Physicist snort
As though some theorem
Had just been demonstrated. This time

The Rebbetzin rattled them:
"How can you hide
From what never goes away?" she asked.

That's the question, isn't it, Dr.,
In the harem of the dead,
Where a God whose love is stronger than wine, and kinkier

Than the Rebbetzin admitted,

Sniffs among His women,
Selecting me for scarab's chitins,
The daughters of Barracks 10

To hold His favorite pose--
Love; sacrifice; forgiveness ...
Tell me, You whom my soul loveth

Where Thou feedest
Where Thou restest
Thy flocks at noon

I eat my way from temple to temple.
The King leans back on the bed.
My jaws tire

Of opening and closing.
Moonlight
Glints on my carapace.

THIRD SESSION

The Rebbetzin says, "Man is made
In the image of God

Who does not have one."
We're lining up for soup,

Starving together, very intimate.
She's already designated me

Her seventh daughter, the one
They will not--Etc.

I faint in her arms, Dr., strictly verboten.
Several million puffs of smoke later

Here I am,
Lying on my bed at night

Seeking Him whom my soul loveth. Living
To know a man. The designated survivor's

Designated lips declare, I will rise now
And search the city,

The streets the narrow places the squares.
Designated body, a little worse for wear, seeks King

Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,
Preferably sans beard. Finds

A puddle cooling on the sheets, half me half
Balding middle-aged Caucasian, mid-40's, 5'10",

Literate, a man of books,
Not Jewish--pace Rebbetzin--

But given the post-war shortage
What the Whore would call a good bet.

Not to mention Dr. that the unmown grass
Was starred with iris

And he shot the sardonic smile I prize

As he bent to pluck me the daisy blooming
Between the monument's bird-specked legs.

"I want you to know me," he says,
Stroking the scars on my hips.

Not stupid, not an evil face, forehead trenched
With something like compassion

But still a bit too eager Dr.
For a pick-up with numbers

On her designated arm
To nod like she believes him.

"I bound books," he says, as though I'd asked.
During the Occupation, he scoured the shells

Of bombed-out mansions,
The ruins of the finest families, Dr.

Decapitated pillars, discreetly ivied craters,
Libraries split open like Faberge eggs.

"Who knows how many I saved," he says,
Pinning my leg with his.

Mildewed Lives, hand-inscribed 'Sonnets,'
To Mme. __, whose skin, etc.,

Exquisite editions of pulp romance,
Carefully bound, in the finest

Hides he had. "Not much to look at
But, I tell you, those stupid books will last ..."

Trust him, Dr.? Is that your professional recommendation?
Jew from camps meets goy of her dreams, spreads legs

Happily ever after?
Hands calloused by needle and awl

Work their way to my breasts,
Appraising--they cannot help it--

The holes in my carapace.
The Whore warned

"Your body is all you have"

But the Rebbetzin
Denied me even that:

"Anna," she'd say, "your body is God's,"
And so it is, Dr.,

The King's own palanquin,
Poles of bone curtained with skin

Tanned by a master hand,
Dyed with the love

Of the daughters of Barracks 10.
Idolatry, Dr., is the refusal to distinguish

God from His images.
Tell me, Solomon, which is this

Rising from the wilderness,
This pillar of civilization

Smelling faintly of cologne, boasting--
He calls it getting to know him--

Of black market hides, improbable survivals,
The unsinged "Song of Songs" he salvaged

From baronial ash?
Look at him now, gaze upon him:

A man who's never owned a dog,
Has a mole on one shoulder, myrrh-colored eyes,

Inexplicable urges
To gather up, to bind.

"Don't talk," he says, stuffing
My mouth with tongue. Daughters of Barracks 10,

Have you seen Him whom my soul loveth?
Have you seen the life

You designated me to live?

The watchmen who guard the city from itself
Advise me to inquire within.

Scarce have I passed from them, Dr., when I find--
I mention this only

Because you remind me so much of him--
A puddle cooling on the sheets, and a man

Made in the image of God
Who doesn't have one.

       Hold him, most beautiful of women
       Don't let him go

"So you bound books," I say, freeing my leg from his.
"Tell me, who supplied the skins?"

Maybe that was the wrong question, Dr.
Despite my innumerable charms

I haven't heard from him since.