was born—before it failed—
when I was beautiful.
Whatever you are
I’ve won a blessing from you.”
The angel, “Yes, we have met
at doors thrust open to an empty room,
a garden, or a pit.
My gifts have human faces
hieroglyphs that command
you without yielding what they mean.
Cast yourself and I will bless your cast
till your bones are dice
for the wind to roll.
I am the demon of beginnings
for those who leap their thresholds
and let the doors swing shut.”
My hair bristling, I stood.
“Get away from me, old
enemy. I know the lying
radiance of that face:
my lover I trusted as the fish
the water, who left me
carrying his child.
The man who bought me
with his strength and beat
me for his weakness.
The girl I saved who turned
and sold her skin
for an easy bed in a house
of slaves. The boy fresh
as a willow sapling
smashed on the stones of war.”
“I am the spirit of hinges,
the fever that lives in dice
and cards, what is picked
up and thrown down. I am
the new that is ancient,
the hope that hurts,
what begins in what has ended.
Mine is the double vision
that everything is sacred, and trivial,
and I love the blue beetle
clicking in the grass as much
as you. Shall I bless you
child and crone?”
“What has plucked the glossy
pride of hair from my scalp,
loosened my teeth in their sockets
wrung my breasts dry as gullies,
rubbed ashes into my sleep
but chasing you?
Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.
Get from me
wielder of the heart’s mirages.
I will follow you to no more graves.”
I spat
and she gathered her tall shuddering wings
and scaled the streaks of dawn
a hawk on fire soaring
and I stood there and could hear the water
burbling and raised my hand
before my face and groped:
What has the sun gone out?
Why is it dark?
For each age, its amulet
Each illness has its demon, burning you with
its fever, beating its quick wings.
Do not leave an infant alone in the house,
my grandmother said, for Lilith is hovering,
hungry. Avoid sleeping in a new house alone.
Demons come to death as flies do, hanging
on the sour sweetish wind. Protect yourself
in an unclean place by spitting three times.
A pregnant woman must go to bed with a knife.
Put iron in a hen’s nest to keep it laying.
Demons suck eggs and squeeze the breath from chicks.
Circle yourself with salt and pray.
By building containers of plutonium
with the power to kill for longer than humans
have walked upright, demons are driven off.
Demons lurk in dark skins, white skins,
demons speak another language, have funny hair.
Very fast planes that fall from the sky
regularly like ostriches trying to fly, protect.
Best of all is the burning of money ritually
in the pentagon shaped shrine. In Langley
the largest prayer wheel computer recites spells
composed of all words written, spoken, thought
taped and stolen from every person alive.
Returning to the cemetery in the old Prague ghetto
Like bad teeth jammed crooked in a mouth
I think, no, because it goes on and on,
rippling in uneven hillocks among the linden
trees drooping, their papery leaves piling
between the crowded tilting slabs.
Stone pages the wind blew open.
The wind petrified into individual
cries. Prisoners penned together
with barely room to stand upright.
Souls of the dead Jews of Prague
waiting for justice under the acid rain.
So much and no further shall you go,
your contaminated dead confined between
strait walls like the ghetto itself.
So what to do? Every couple of generations,
pile on the dirt, raise the stones up
and add another layer of fresh bones.
The image I circle and do not want:
naked pallid bodies whipped through
the snow and driven into the chamber,
so crowded that dying slowly in the poison
cloud they could not fall as their nerves
burned slowly black, upright in death.
In my luggage I carried from Newcomb Hollow
two stones for Rabbi Loew’s memorial
shaped like a narrow tent, one for Judah
on his side and one for Perl on hers.
But my real gift is the novel they
speak through. For David Gans, astronomer,
geographer, historian, insatiably curious
and neat as a cat in his queries,
I brought a fossil to lay at the foot
of his grave marked with a goose and a star,
Mogen David, so the illiterate could find
him, as Judah has his rampant lion.
In ’68 I had to be hoisted
over the fence. Among the stones
I was alone except for a stray black cat
that sang to me incessantly of need,
so hungry it ate bread from my jacket pocket.
This year buses belch out German tourists
and the graves are well tended.
This is a place history clutches you
by the foot as you walk the human earth,
like a hand grabbing from the grave,
not to frighten but to admonish.
Remember. History is the iron
in your blood carrying oxygen
so you can burn food and live.
Read this carved book with your fingers
and your failing eyes. The language
will speak in you silently
nights afterward, stone and bone.
The fundamental truth
The Christian right, Islamic Jihad,
the Jewish right bank settlers bringing
the Messiah down, the Japanese sects
who worship by bombing subways,
they all hate each other
but more they hate the mundane,
ordinary people who love living
more than dying in radiant glory,
who shuffle and sigh and make supper.
They need a planet of their own,
perhaps even a barren moon
with artificial atmosphere,
where they will surely be nearer
to their gods and their fiercest
enemies, where they can kill
to their heart’s peace
kill to the last standing man
and leave the rest of us be.
Not mystics to whom the holy
comes in the core of struggle
in a shimmer of blinding quiet,
not scholars haggling out the inner
meaning of gnarly ancient sentences.
No, the holy comes to these zealots
as a license to kill, for self doubt
and humility have dr
ied like mud
under their marching feet.
They have far more in common
with each other, these braggarts
of hatred, the iron hearted
in whose ear a voice spoke
once and left them deaf.
Their faith is founded on death
of others, and everyone is other
to them, whose Torah, Bible and Koran
are splattered in letters of blood.
Amidah: on our feet we speak to you
We rise to speak
a web of bodies aligned like notes of music.
1.
Bless what brought us through
the sea and the fire; we are caught
Yet you have taught us to push against the walls,
to reach out and pull each other along,
to strive to find the way through
if there is no way around, to go on.
To utter ourselves with every breath
against the constriction of fear,
to know ourselves as the body born from Abraham
and Sarah, born out of rock and desert.
We reach back through two hundred arches of hips
long dust, carrying their memories inside us
to live again in our life, Issac and Rebecca,
Rachel, Jacob, Leah. We say words shaped
by ancient use like steps worn into rock.
2.
Bless the quiet of sleep
easing over the ravaged body, that quiets
the troubled waters of the mind to a pool
in which shines the placid broad face of the moon.
Bless the teaching of how to open
in love so all the doors and windows of the body
swing wide on their rusty hinges
and we give ourselves with both hands.
Bless what stirs in us compassion
for the hunger of the chickadee in the storm
starving for seeds we can carry out,
the wounded cat wailing in the alley,
that shows us our face in a stranger,
that teaches us what we clutch shrivels
but what we give goes off in the world
carrying bread to people not yet born.
Bless the gift of memory
that breaks unbidden, released
from a flower or a cup of tea
so the dead move like rain through the room.
Bless what forces us to invent
goodness every morning and what never frees
us from the cost of knowledge, which is
to act on what we know again and again.
3.
All living are one and holy, let us remember
as we eat, as we work, as we walk and drive.
All living are one and holy, we must make ourselves worthy.
We must act out justice and mercy and healing
as the sun rises and as the sun sets,
as the moon rises and the stars wheel above us,
we must repair goodness.
We must praise the power of the one that joins us.
Whether we plunge in or thrust ourselves far out
finally we reach the face of glory too bright
for our eyes and yet we burn and we give light.
We will try to be holy,
we will try to repair the world given us to hand on.
Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds
that moves inside us.
Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice,
holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness
holy is the foot that walks toward mercy.
Let us lift each other on our shoulders and carry each other along.
Let holiness move in us.
Let us pay attention to its small voice.
Let us see the light in others and honor that light.
Remember the dead who paid our way here dearly, dearly
and remember the unborn for whom we build our houses.
Praise the light that shines before us, through us, after us,
Amein.
Kaddish
Look around us, search above us, below, behind.
We stand in a great web of being joined together.
Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent
passing through us in the body of Israel
and our own bodies, let’s say amein.
Time flows through us like water.
The past and the dead speak through us.
We breathe out our children’s children, blessing.
Blessed is the earth from which we grow,
Blessed the life we are lent,
blessed the ones who teach us,
blessed the ones we teach,
blessed is the word that cannot say the glory
that shines through us and remains to shine
flowing past distant suns on the way to forever.
Let’s say amein.
Blessed is light, blessed is darkness,
but blessed above all else is peace
which bears the fruits of knowledge
on strong branches, let’s say amein.
Peace that bears joy into the world,
peace that enables love, peace over Israel
everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, let’s say amein.
Wellfleet Shabbat
The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekinah
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clean night.
The head of the year
The moon is dark tonight, a new
moon for a new year. It is
hollow and hungers to be full.
It is the black zero of beginning.
Now you must void yourself
of injuries, insults, incursions.
Go with empty hands to those
you have hurt and make amends.
It is not too late. It is early
and about to grow. Now
is the time to do what you
know you must and have feared
to begin. Your face is dark
too as you turn inward to face
yourself, the hidden twin
of all you must grow to be.
Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.
Breadcrumbs
Some time on Rosh Hashana I go,
a time dictated by tide charts,
services. The once I did tashlich
on the rising tide and the crumbs
came back to me, my energy soured,
vinegar of anxiety. Now I eye the times.
I choose the dike, where the Herring River
pours in and out of the bay, where at
low tide in September blue herons stalk
totemic to spear
the alewives hastening
silver-sided from the fresh ponds to
the sea. As I toss my crumbs, muttering
prayers, a fisherman rebukes me: It’s
not right to feed the fish, it distracts
them from his bait. Sometimes it’s
odd to be a Jew, like a three-
legged heron with bright purple head,
an ibis in white plumes diving
except that with global warming
we do sometimes glimpse an ibis
in our marshes, and I am rooted here
to abide the winter when this tourist
has gone back to Cincinnati.
My rituals are mated to this fawn
colored land floating on the horizon
of water. My havurah calls itself
Am haYam, people of the sea,
and we are wedded to the oceans
as truly as the Venetian doge who tossed
his gold ring to the Adriatic.
All rivers flow at last into the sea
but here it is, at once. So we stand
the tourist casting for his fish
and I tossing my bread. The fish
snap it up at once. Tonight perhaps
he will broil my sins for supper.
The New Year of the Trees
It is the New Year of the Trees, but here
the ground is frozen under the crust of snow.
The trees snooze, their buds tight as nuts.
Rhododendron leaves roll up their stiff scrolls.
In the white and green north of the diaspora
I am stirred by a season that will not arrive
for six weeks, as wines on far continents prickle
to bubbles when their native vines bloom.
What blossoms here are birds jostling
at feeders, pecking sunflower seeds
and millet through the snow: tulip red