In Hitler’s Bathtub
“While the ‘machine-monster’ was dead, he’d never really been alive for me until today.”
— Lee Miller
She comes to him hollowed, porcelain cool,
her photos still spooled inside her cameras;
and all these spoils at her disposal, this opportune
trespass in his house, the soldiers giddily
grabbing souvenirs, monogrammed silver,
the cufflinks, the signed classics, “touching
what he had touched.” She goes even further,
his bathtub — and for her Jewish lover
to photograph her there, no cheesecake,
just the site’s enough, only her arms and blonde head
visible. She places her boots, recently dirtied
from Auschwitz, squarely on the mat, bathing here,
her act of ironic desecration, gesture to the shower head,
the man who made a holocaust of hygiene.
Or an instance of her own demonic curiosities,
lust for witness, and for unflinchingly recording
his atrocities, as she exposes herself willingly
to his radioactive evil, as close to his body as possible,
steeped in his forensics, his skin cells, his residual oils,
risking contagion, in a defiant brinksmanship,
white witchcraft — but it’s quite different when
she steps in, the water hot, steamy, welcoming.
His hands had been on that washcloth she uses now,
his hands on this soap, the faucets. As suds glide down
her back gondola-like, she relaxes in a sort of swoon.
She is bathing where he bathed, sits in the tub where
he sat, bottom to bottom, and like a chair for Goldilocks,
who found her equivalent bear, it feels just right,
even though it should feel wrong. It’s not
their sympathetic evil, or hers as potential. Few
can match him on that score. Instead,
she feels him deeply inside her,
who is anonymous now, manifold,
only another living being, with a body
like her body, needing washing, not absolution,
filling her like schools of fish, their fins
like fans undulant, swimming the surface
below her skin, bubbling each pore
after a long absence, revivifying,
the blood thrilling, as though returning
to her limbs, restoring her to her own nakedness.
She arises flushed from the bath, towels off,
this not pictured: for a brief time, known
to herself, she is real, alive again.
* * * * *
[Lee Miller’s remark in the epigraph above is quoted from Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke.]