Photographs Taken by My Grandfather of Neu-Lobitz,
His Childhood Home, Circa 1925
Granary
I.
This is a photograph of where the drive turns
from the main house. I’m a bit at a loss
about the principle that drew my grandfather
to use film to record this view. Not much to see:
the drive curves rightward, a few wheel-tracks
over lines of lately-raked sand,
some short conifers (twenty years old perhaps)
on the edge of a little island of park.
If I could better remember
the distinctions among conifer families
that Frau Zapp taught in fourth grade,
and how to translate the terms into English,
I could say, Tanne, Kiefer, Fichte.
If pressed I’d say Tanne = fir and Fichte = spruce,
which is confusing because the names
beginning with “f” don’t go together,
and Kiefer—the word for both pine
and jaw— often slips my mind completely,
even though in English
it’s the catchall term most used.
In any case, the branches
hold out their plates of fingers
in orderly fans toward the drive
the wagons and carriages circle on.
II.
One time my great-grandmother ordered the carriage for a visit
to her cousins in Klein-Spiegel, about 15 km away;
when her husband heard of her plans,
he had the horses unhitched
because he thought it wasteful to use them
for such a frivolous thing.
III.
My brother-in-law Jan-Willem, a landscape architect from Holland, writes, it is quite difficult to distinguish conifers, let alone from a photo. There are many cultivars, grown just for aesthetic botanical purposes, and I suspect that the tree planted in the yard in the picture is such a cultivar. I also expect that tree cultivation was well developed in that part of the world 100 years ago. In garden environments, landscapers commonly do not use native tree species (which are considered too “boring,” “natural,” and “wild”) to accentuate the unique architectural and aesthetic qualities of non-native plants in the designed environment. A blue spruce would have been unusual and would have added a special aspect in shape and color to the place. So, that’s what I guess it might be: eine Blaufichte, oder Stechfichte, oder Blautanne. Three synonyms for the same tree.
IV.
Three terms my great-grandfather Carl Tielsch’s sons used to describe their father:
verbohrt, ungerechte Härte, Tyrann.
V.
On the other side of the drive,
less orderly, clumps of bushes heap
at the lawn’s edge and a shade tree
fills the photograph’s upper half.
Behind, almost crowded out by greenery,
one wall and corner of the granary:
timbered Xs outlined in mortar
fill the corner boxes of the half-timber frame,
the brick’s regular pattern pretty
and distinct. I imagine the colors
that drew my grandfather’s eye
and that the photo can’t capture:
North German red brick
against pale mortar
and the black-brown
of the wood frame.
Rhododendron- and beech-green,
blue of spruces and sky,
the broad-spread sand
of the drive at his feet.
Great-Grandfather Carl Tielsch Jr.’s Desk
If a man owns a large estate,
he’ll have to push a lot of papers, more
if he owns a glass factory
as well. More still if also
he’s a government assessor.
He’ll work from four A.M.
to six at night
with seven secretaries.
If seven secretaries
why the towers of paper
on and around
his massive desk?
Nine stacks,
all two feet high
at least. He keeps photos
of his loved ones
where he works. Look:
a forest of them.
On the wall, a picture
of his mother
and in a row below her,
three baby pictures.
A dozen photos at least
are ranged around the blotter
on his desk. Sometimes a man
with seven secretaries
has five children
who must be raised
to the standards
society requires. But
a man with seven secretaries
(five children too)
must be careful with
the household cash. With
all he manages,
the decisions he makes
about what he deems
the household does
and doesn’t need,
his wife in turn
(the secretaries too
are housed and fed)
is tasked to practice
radical economy. Sometimes
the task is brutal: bring
the wormy ham to table
or he’ll make trouble
about the waste.
Here’s the clock
upon the wall. There’s the face
of the barometer.
One measures
the chill, the other
the atmosphere:
oppressive. Neither measures
how hard he is. Still,
the photo of his wife
is at the center
of the photo thicket,
right where he’ll see it
when he works. Dark
evening dress,
shoulders bare, pearls
at the throat, hair
piled high, she’s younger
even than the year
he met her (over thirty
when they married):
the woman in the photo here
is barely twenty. This is a woman
looking as she should.
Not as he says she should:
he doesn’t know her.
This is a woman
looking toward
a life she hopes for.
Blank of Light (Interior with Mirror and Two Windows)
If the painting at the left were the one
that always hung in my grandmother’s dining room
when I was a child, and the light washed into this room
every day over the chair placed
under the mirror between the windows, and the light
washing the room hit not just the runner on the floor
and the crystal chandelier, the immobile groupings
of chairs around tables, the carpets’
gentle wrinkles, the vases with their flower bouquets
in this Gesellschaftszimmer, made for company
but empty now save for the massive tile stove
standing behind my grandfather
as he takes this photograph (though
on some winter nights electric light played
in the chandelier’s drops and his mother’s and his sisters’
hair, the aunts seated together by the stove),
and if to catch the sun
had stepped a bit to the left perhaps
or forward, and the angle of the mirror tilted less
off the wall and more into the room,
then instead of the crisscross of the rugs’ patterns
apparent but almost erased in the light that climbs
the narrow mirror’s glass or in the switchbacks
of the polished parquet between them,
as it winds its way, a river carrying the space
between the paths their feet most tread, like the currents
that ten years later scattered the remaining inhabitants
of the house, the most precious items distributed
among the family (so that the painting
that hung in my grandmother’s dining room
may well have been the one that hangs here at the left
in this photograph)—then perhaps I would really know
something of this room, perhaps at least his shoes
would appear in the reflection, perhaps even his face:
twenty, barely: as he studies the scene to select the aperture,
just catching at left in its massive gilt frame the shape
of a faraway Tuscan hillside, road, stone home
and two or three human figures before it, a family standing
before the house they must have lived in for generations,
the oil paint shining gently in the reflected morning light,
the house, the land, the people, the trees, all perched
high above a wide sea, and beyond the limit of the frame,
the almost-empty family room with the photographer
watched by the painted family standing still together.
The photos
the glass beads
found in ancient gravesites
near the sheep meadow on the estate
the papers the archaeologists publish
about the graves
the glass that flowed off the factory line
for sixty-five years the frame
of a window: a single pane
made it through the war unscathed
the borders on the map
or not the borders
just their consequences
the plan my grandfather drew (not to scale)
of the manor house and grounds
documents saved
documents lost
and all that went undocumented
the rising tones in my daughter’s voices
as they quarrel and
the virus particles wafting
in the air this present catastrophe
rise and fall
of the dog’s chest as she lies sleeping
lamplight on a dark day
the damp
the sweater I pull tight
across my middle
its bone buttons at my chest
the past
the weight in my DNA the yarn I knit
the sweater from what unravels
when I press against
what hurts
the knife of anger rising in a voice
that cuts if I heed it
and also if I don’t
the limits of our daily lives in our home
the porcelain plates on the wall
and in our glass-front cabinet
that hail from the long-evaporated manor
or the other factory my family owned and
in the engagement photo
taken in that home
in 1934: my grandparents’ hands resting
his left upon his left knee
her left upon his right
heads turned toward each other
eyes joyed: the smiles on the faces
of family ranged around them
but also what the photo hides or misses
his mother’s absence
the fire she lit that took her
all the losses that later came
translucent as glass thread spun
on factory drums
the wartime drums
just warming in the wings
the true inheritance they’d craft and then
the small porcelain fawn at rest
upon the sideboard
their chairs push up against
who knows where that faun is now
(sold, looted by one army
or another, shattered in a landfill’s layers
or whole still, in the vitrine
of some other descendent?) the hair
on my eldest daughter’s head
thick like my grandmother’s
and glossy
my younger daughter’s smile
almost like my grandfather in the photo
though I never knew him
extractive capitalism and its consequences
how the tooth
scrapes greedy against the pit the tick
of the analog clock on the wall
as my daughters click through
to another online class
what I’m tallying from the couch
as outside the day’s events roll on
harder than glass
the next headline my own face
turned toward or away
from what I feel powerless against
what lies within my grasp
what feels too remote to touch
my grandparents’ hands
their graves beside each other now
the ivy the headstone with their names
an ocean away
my daughter’s hair
the anger
in her voice
—
Monika Cassel was raised in the United States and Germany. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Guesthouse, Longleaf Review, Phoebe Journal, petrichor, and The Laurel Review, and her translations from German have appeared in POETRY, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, Asymptote, and Harvard Review Online, among others. Her chapbook Grammar of Passage (flipped eye publishing) was the winner of the 2015 Venture Poetry Award. She was a founding faculty member at New Mexico School for the Arts, where she developed its creative writing program. Currently she is a degree candidate in poetry in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools in Portland, Oregon.