"A Small Elegy"

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in Czech, "Mon maminku," my little mommy, which the translator has rendered as "my diminutive mom." He imagines that after all these years she's still sitting back there, quietly uncomplaining, thinking about his father who died so long ago. It is the next moment in the poem, when the tense radically changes, that I find especially compelling. "And then she is skinning fruit for me," he says, "I am in the room. Sitting right next to her." He doesn't say "And then she was skinning fruit for me," but instead finds himself catapulted into the past as a living present. He has been wrenched out of one time into another. The amplitude of his feeling is nearly unbearable and he starts shaking his fist at God, using a child's language, calling him a ''bully" because now he is aware that God has taken away so much, because so much is lost. And he then proceeds with the ruthlessness of a logical proposition to face what can no longer be evaded. "Because of all those hours I slept ...

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