Dedication 1 for Hy Mozenter and Aaron Isaacson: Buried Books

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Wind fills Miller's Field. March hardens the layer of soot. You bring a pick and an axe in addition to the shovel, but you know the ground gives before the outer shell of the snow melts, the few hours of chill at midnight. A question of appearances and essences. You break the thin window of frost with your fist. Some of course, were easy,

books on history and economics, Marx, Herzen, issues of the Daily Worker, Jewish Currents, Lenin's Imperialism, Mike Gold. Others were more difficult. What about Mark Twain? Or Whitman. The Republic. Or letters: today we went around to tobacco fields just west of Pittsfield to hand out leaflets. The tobacco hung from the eaves of wooden sheds, and farmhands slept on ground soaked through by irrigation. Naturally, tobacco is worth more than men. So the letters, too.

Aaron brings two fifty gallon drums from his father's farm in Meadville. Don't ask what was in these. Acrid, the smell stays in your spit. You turn a drum over, light a kerosene lantern. Aaron snuffs it. We'll dig in the dark. And what you dig doesn't need precision, only speed. This will at least give the FBI something to talk about. You lower the drums on ropes. And what of your fantasies of meeting near stone walls, a cinquefoil on the lapel, digging up the cache of smuggled rifles? Ignorance is your one defense.

A capable innocence. A hard outer shell, inside which there is only soft earth. You remember when you first saw photographs of the Nazi children burning books. A woman behind you says I hear they burn Bibles there. You want to correct her. What they burn there is what we must bury here ourselves. Even your protest must be a smile. The slap of wet earth against metal. Is that you? you say to Aaron as he approaches. He arrives in the dark and says nothing. What is the difference now? Burning is a public spectacle. Who's there? Nazis are the ones who read the forbidden in secret. Communists merely bury it. Who is it? The footsteps are louder. Who. Aaron, you fuck why didn't you say anything? And you admit, you couldn't answer the question either.