Picture what they’d have done

        With my wife, Tan Yi, her narrow

        Hips, pouting lips, doll’s feet, and

        Five-thousand-year-old overbite:

        Tossing noodles, no doubt, wrapping

        Jyouza and cleaving pigs

        Back in the Nazi mess hall.

        Between meals, they’d force her to

        Rewrite Lao Tsu’s ten thousand things

        Into ten thousand Jews, Poles, gypsies,

        Twenty-five other nationalities:

        Limb-locked in purple, pink, and cream

        Pastels orbiting the beautiful Moon

        Of the Tao. Title it, they’d insist,

        “Something Mysteriously Formed.”

        After finishing her day’s revision

        Of the Moon, Tan Yi would

        Walk back and forth on officers’

        Backs, at the same time reciting

        Revisions, the naked Nazis

        Trying to imagine the death

        Cries (up to now a camp mystery)

        Of an Oriental. Just what is

        The psychobiological pathology

        Of this creature seized one day from

        Her jewelry shop in Munchen

        For selling jade to Jews?

        Tan Yi, now in the camp museum

        And unaware of her seizure,

        Lingers before the famous photo

        Of a man entwined in electrified

        Barbed wire, frozen, sprinting,

        Black hair raised and over

        As though combed before the photo

        Was taken. Tan Yi points out his

        Dark brown skin. She suspects he was

        African. All those volts, I say,

        Can darken a European. Or

        It could simply be the camera’s

        Location in relation to

        The day’s shadowing. She

        Injects that he was likely

        Chinese—always alleging this

        About people who are brave and robust

        Like this man, dead yet still storming.

        Now she insists he was Chinese, blood

        Of Hainan, the tropical island and

        Farthest point south where skin is

        Darker. He was Spanish or Jewish,

        I say. “Okay,” she snaps, pointing

        To the eyes, “but he must’ve

        Had Chinese blood.” The eyes are not

        Slanted, I say. They’re squinting.

        She steps up, her nose nearly

        Touching the photo, and admits

        He could’ve come from anywhere

        Depending on the season,

        Time of day, the camera’s angle,

        The shadows, and our revisions

        Of why he was running.

Copyright © Kevin Dobbs, 2005. All Rights Reserved.