SHIRIM: A JEWISH POETRY JOURNAL

Reflections

I was brought up to be a Jewish atheist, not bar mitzvahed, on my eighth day I was circumcised "for mostly health reasons," on a rare morning set aside for me and comedy. We had no Seder. My mother, bless her Jewish heart, spoke of an aunt who lit candles on Friday nights in whispers, as if she had bad breath.

There was pre- and post-Holocaust literature from the American Jewish Congress in our house; there was an English bible to be read, if one chose, also as literature. When I was 13 I preferred reading anthropology, Freud in the Modern Library edition. Rimbaud and Lorca, my bible I discovered on one of my days of truancy, spent mostly at the 42nd Street library and the Museum of Modern Art.

In my twenties, visiting on the island of Mallorca in a house full of Catholic self-mortification, one sunny winter morning we discovered that a 24-year-old bleeding daughter was wearing a garter with nails in it, given her by a nun at school to do penance for her sister, who was marrying "a Protestant," who was I. I remember thinking, I don't know what Judaism is or what I've got but it's better than this. In that house in Spain I began writing a poem that I thought was devotional, abandoned still in mystery years later. (The bleeding daughter, by the way, ended up living in Philadelphia and married to an orthodox Jew.)

I left that house a kind of limping Jew, carrying my pack of ignorance. Since then I've read some of what I should have read. I am grateful for the wisdom of Jewish and Christian friends, and, yes, Islamic and Buddhist friends.

Trying to write a poem about what I do not know or understand was and is my way to get at the unknown and the unknowable: the parachute for body and spirit that catches me tumbling in mid-air straightens me out and sets me down with a bump until the next time I am pushed out or leap: a volunteer.

Poems

For Margaret

My mother near her death
is white as a downy feather.
I used to think her death was as distant
as a tropical bird,
a giant macaw, whatever that is
— a thing I have as little to do with
as the distant poor.
I find a single feather of her suffering,
I blow it gently as she blew
into my neck and ear.

A single downy feather is on the scales,
opposed by things of weight, not spirit.
I remember the smell of burning feathers.
I wish we could sit upon the grass
and talk about grandchildren
and great-grandchildren.
A worm directs us into the ground.
We look alike.

I sing a lullaby to her about her children
who are safe and their children.
I place a Venetian lace tablecloth
on the grass, of the whitest linen.
The wind comes with its song
about things given that are taken away
and given again in another form.

Why are the poor cawing, hooting,
screaming in the woods?
I wish death were a whippoorwill,
the first bird I could name.
Why is everything so heavy?
I did not think
she was still helping me to carry
the weight of my life.
Now the world's poor are before me.
How can I lift them one by one in my arms?

Fisherman

My father made a synagogue of a boat.
I fish in ghettos, cast towards the lilypads,
strike rock and roil the unworried waters;
I in my father's image: rusty and off hinge,
the fishing box between us like a covenant.
I reel in, the old lure bangs against the boat.
As the sun shines I take his word for everything.
My father snarls his line, spends half an hour
unsnarling mine. Eel, sunfish and bullhead
are not for me. At seven I cut my name for bait.
The worm gnawed toward the mouth of my name.
"Why are the words for temple and school
the same," I asked, "And why a school of fish?"
My father does not answer. On a bad cast
my fish strikes, breaks water, takes the line.

Into a world of good and evil, I reel
a creature languished in the floor. I tear out
the lure, hooks cold. I catch myself,
two hooks through the hand,
blood on the floor of the synagogue. The wound
is purple, shows a mouth of white birds;
hook and gut dangle like a rosary,
another religion in my hand.

I'm ashamed of this image of crucifixion.
A Jew's image is a reading man.
My father tears out the hooks, returns to his book,
a nineteenth-century history of France.
Our war is over:
death hooks the corner of his lips.
The wrong angel takes over the lesson.

Kangaroo

My soul climbs up my legs,
buries its face in blood and veins,
locks its jaws on the nipple that is me,
I jump my way into the desert.
What does my soul, safe in its pocket care
what I say to desert flowers?
Like a kangaroo
I pray and mock prayer.

I never took a vow of darkness.
I sit beside a boulder writing
on yellow lined paper. Once I thought
— I'll pull my soul out of my mouth,
a lion will sleep at my feet,
I'll spend forty days in the desert,
I'll find something remarkable, a sign:
strains of desert grass
send the root of a single blade
down thirty feet,
I remember flakes of dry blood,
the incredible rescue of the man by the soul.

Under the aching knuckles of the wind,
move down in your pocket
away from remorse and money
learn discomfort from the frog,
the worm, the gliding crow,
they all hunt in repose, like men in prayer.

I can hardly distinguish myself from darkness.
I am not what I am. I demand the heart
to answer for what is given. I jump into the desert,
a big Jew, the law under my arm like bread.

Song

Not myth, not document, or hymn,
but a way of mourning by writing
and rewriting, as it turned out, he wrote
a song about the distance between fathers
and sons, mothers and daughters,
as if it were natural law
that they must reflect one another, meet,
or touch like water and sky,
that, of course, only seem to touch at a distance.

The first days of March,
in the air the smell of the newborn.
He tried to write imitations of the miracles'
and illusions of everyday life.
What once were names and titles
became slips of the tongue, then figures of speech:
love tore open the oak chest of his memories,
he thought he could just heap clothes on
when he dressed or undressed.

The words father and son lost their separateness,
each became an eclipse of the other;
his thinking became a river of the dead,
he could not stop.
In a garden, under grape leaves
and pink mallow, he rested his head on books
and wept over his unnecessary loneliness,
— not for the seasons' passing more quickly,
not for all the worship and praise
his God had disregarded.