Yet another flight, a stampede, a rumpus, a regular old Kessel Garten, you know it? First and Second Classes disembarking themselves orderly first and second, thirdly the steerage last, ruddering columns buttressing cots in the bowels of the ship without limb, the sway of unsettled stomach rigged of hame, of hammock emptily swaying under the weight of unregistered ghosts, phantoms released on no one’s recognizance, specters without papers made of ashed papers, to float over the gangplank the bone of a Cossack, his horse, the hamate, the hanging halyard, the Gibbet, fallen masts a pier, the gangway to barge, the pier, walk, scuffle, drag deathmarch, todes babycrawl, the threshold, door, stairwell, into the Great Hall’s receiving, this the last station left in which to smooth out your skirts, to tuck in your shirt if shirt you have, if not your flesh, fluff your breasts, pinch your cheeks rosy; these bars and barbs, this wire, these pens, gates and their kept doctors, interpretercousins, guardbrothers, inspectors; the language of languages…take a deep breath, hold it in, let it out; you’re dead, there’s no second opinion; look at this eye chart, read the last line aloud, S Z C Z E D R Z Y K; do you know what it says, asks the doctor, know it, the immigrant says, he’s my uncle! Lipschitz, don’t give me lip, bei mir bist du sheyn fergessen, Welcome to America, Maran Hagaon Harav Avraham Halevi Moylvintldik…Shalom, Murray Gone; Hello, My Name is (Race Suicide), this naming death that’s named itself only after weeks, over months, after maybe even seasons of wait without name, not just unknown, inexistent, suffered and suffering just to enter, to be: many only to be turned away, and without their identities redeemed, sent back, RETURN TO — Isaac, or maybe Jacob — SENDER, reverted back to themselves, those unlucky few without name or a prayer, cast deep down into the real again, stowed home, lost to the generations to come; the map’s dot a speck of lint, a mote of dust, blown away, becomes a ruin, a coordinate fallen to time, desolate, wrecked, left for the waste upon which it rests. From south elevation, the Great Hall’s a mess, a mumble of lines, a jumble of Babel none too towering, instead laid vertical, fallen in every dialect’s design: Austro-Hungarian railroad shed, Ottoman slit, Russian Orthodox thrust, Parisian frill. Death by Renaissance in brick without hearth, as if tumbled from sky and only then, suntinted, threealarm red though fireproofed, the stucco façade mottled, jaundiced, its foundational limestone pissstained, its portico that limb distended from socket, wicked, a hand outstretched, to point away, to dismiss, to order, accuse…or else, arrival depending, to greet, to welcome, Shalom; to clasp warmly, give us a shake; below four massive turrets risen as lesser towers, the last survivors of the sprawl fallen below; their flags: tainted in blue, white, and red; the knives that pierce them wound, too, the mist, which is the breath of the ocean, guarding the Registry, the Island entire, from the gray occupation of clouds.
