Donald Platt

More and more, historyseems to me like the General Slocum, slow, wooden, paddle-wheel steamship loaded downwith one thousand three hundred and forty-two German Americans from Kleindeutschland,immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side. They were traveling to northern Long Islandfor a Sunday-school picnic on June 15, 1904. The steamship caught fire. Blue sky. Sun.A windy Wednesday. …

“And I Tiresias have foresuffered all…” —T. S. Eliot I prophesyreluctantly. Oedipus claimed I had no foresight. It was he who could not see.I told him the dark, stark truth. He removed Jocasta’s bronze brooch from her hanged body.With its sharpened end, he gouged out the two suns that blazed blindly across the wide skyof …