Page 59 - Demo

Faustus Remembers the Trees
These days, Faustus tries to avoid wars and revolutions. He’s seen too many. He remembers how trees along the avenues in Barcelona were riddled with
bullet holes, some from Republicans, some from Fascists, some from
Anarchists and Stalinists.
He also knows how easily the scars disappear. Streets are widened, new trees are
planted, buildings are patched and freshly painted. Memory, though, hides everywhere. It whispers from the new benches along the sidewalk. It even shrieks a little when store front gates are closed at the end
of day.
Faustus is not a historian, but he’s lived a long time. He knows that if an order’s been given to build a crematorium, the people to be burned there
have already been chosen. He pushes away the images that come to mind, the rice mill in Trieste converted to a police detention camp, the ashes of Jews and partisans, brick and wire, the prison cells in a neat row.
Faustus reads each day’s news on a small laptop. He prefers a newspaper, but he reads what’s available. Sometimes, the photographs remind him of
Goya’s etching “And there’s nothing to be done” from The Disasters of War. The man bound to the post will be shot next. The firing squad will not run out of bullets, and if they did, they would just use bayonets.
He used to be angry with human beings. Faustus knows that nothing justifies what they do to each other, but he realizes that no one has ever sat up in
bed in the morning, had a cup of coffee, and thought to himself, “Today, I think I’ll kill people who’re just like me.” There’s always a long sequence
of events and intentions, and the usual arguments deployed like troops of calvary: freedom, patriotism, justice—but it always leads to Goya’s figure tied to the post.
Mephistopheles theorizes that humans commit these horrors because they’re not capable of imagining no longer existing. They can’t understand nothingness because it’s not something that can be perceived, and all the languages treat it as a noun. M says humans are bizarrely unaware of how fragile their world is, how easily consciousness vanishes and memory ceases to exist. Other people, he says, are not real to them, and they are not real to themselves.
Faustus does not dispute this theory.
Franklin has published eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays. His poems have been published in One Art, The High Window, The Marrow, Nimrod, and Rattle, among others. A former contributor to The Woven Tale Press, he practices law in Miami and teaches poetry in Florida prisons.
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