POEM

WATER COURSES

I followed you down by the water courses.

So wrote a poet many years ago

But not so far in the past,

When it was still possible to say such a thing

As water courses

And not know what it meant.

I heard you in ripples and felt your eddies.

No one today would speak that way,

But he was someone whose English

Was learned from a book,

A sacred text, and he meant brook

Or stream, where someone would fish

Or bathe, and where lovers met.

You lay beneath the currents as below the sky.

The language of his heart and soul was Hebrew

And when he tried another tongue,

A modern one, his heart was tied in knots,

His soul became unsure of itself,

For it is so much simpler in the ancient speech,

Fewer words, less grammar,

And far more implications

You can follow in the letters of silence.

Your shadow pressed upon the crystal sands.

Water courses means nothing today,

Nor even braes or floods or brooks,

The concept of our love is shallow,

Unclean by moonlight,

Unfair in the sun,

Raucous, public and brief,

Like our words and our syntax.

I dreamed you were there when the waters passed.

I envy that young man in Tel-Aviv

Who thought he could turn his naïve dreams

Into terms he found in a dictionary,

As though he could make old dreams live

By alluding to archaic words for streams

And brooks; no, he wasn’t reactionary.

He was too innocent.  I will forgive

His errors, for whatever his passion means

Flows by deeply and slowly.

I dip my fingers in the water course and feel your words.

Words carry

Their own history hidden their sounds

And appearance, not in their meanings.

Meanings may be found in undulating clouds

Not in the water courses,

On the echoes of the wind among the trees.

Long after they are no longer spoken

And their resonance has grown dry

As an ancient wadi’s path through the hills,

I dream your presence in the shape of things,

No longer language, no longer sense.

Only my eagerness to lie with you remains.

His eagerness was naïve, his words innocent

Of meaning, his love a lost impression

Like the original couple who danced

By the shores of a water course

And left their footprints, fossils now.

You whispered then and touched my soul.

Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations: Aphorisms for the New Year

Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations: Aphorisms for the New Year: Made-up names with no consideration of family traditions and continuity, social propriety, or the meanings and allusions they bear. ...

Aphorisms for the New Year

Made-up names with no consideration of family traditions and continuity, social propriety, or the meanings and allusions they bear.

Concerts for Funerals, Christmas, New Year or any other special occasion which are merely composed of the same popular music as one hears all the time on radio, in elevators and supermarkets.

People who wear the same informal clothing when they go out for dinner, attend an opera or go the beach.

Someone who says “in all history” and means wither “in my life time:” or perhaps “over the past few generations”.  This is narcissism or solipsism.

Another who says “Evolution” or “Nature hardwired us” as though a natural process were not only animated, coherent and consistent, but sentient and wilful.  This is nothing but determinism.

Then those who treat their animal pets as though they were not only human, but their own children or best friends.

Aggressive vegans. Let them eat pebbles, salt and paper.

Where does all the gluten go which is now regularly removed from food?

Anyone who is calm, logical and patient in our world must be crazy.

New Year’s Day, 2016.  Stabbings in Jerusalem.  Car-rammings in Etzion.  Shootings in Tel-Aviv.  The media press cannot find a motivation.  Perhaps, may we suggest, anti-Semitism?

An Ethical Conundrum: From mystery misery, without mastery; from confusion fusion, without theory or connection.  Each day we almost die by mistakes, accidents, unperceived wishes.  Years later only, should we live so long, the circumstances become evident and the motives embarrass us.  What it is impossible to dream away, conscience invalidates. What we lose to sleep, however, lets the delusions continue.

The travelling detective discovers wherever he goes new mysteries.  He identifies clues and draws inferences the local experts cannot.  Then, having exposed part of the truth, he moves on, unable to enjoy the benefits that accrue to safety and security.  Having gained more skills with each episode, he finds the greatest riddle of all why his coming to a place causes so much pain and misery.

The question is not just why certain movies and television series endure the test of time and can be watched with enjoyment and learning decade after decade, but why some comic characters and situations cannot be transplanted from place to place, as well as time to time. 

Dracula casts long shadows on the wall but reflects no images in the mirror.  Memories weigh our minds down and creep like revenants after our bodies, while doubts and hesitations unconsciously hold us back from the fullness of life.

The fatuous and the pedantic: one insists that you follow the strict dictionary spelling and meaning of words, the other that you follow the original text you are working with, even down to the errors and variants. 

Nothing is perfect.  I am perfectly assured of that. 

After the North Koreans explode their next hydrogen bomb, we will all have funny haircuts.

When I was a boy, most of the people I knew were born in the nineteenth century, or at least before World War One.  There were still horse-drawn carts making deliveries of milk and ice.  Telephones had dials and radios had tubes. There was no television. Now young people expect me to know about the digital age and online payments. 

Little more than a century old, and the book that comes across the world—one whole continent, one whole ocean—is falling apart.  The pages are loose and disintegrate in my hands. Carefully I make my photocopies.  Suddenly the text looks clean and sturdy.  Everything reads as though it were printed today, except for the marks of paper flakes, sewing strings, and blotches of time.  I fast approach that age, too, yet who will ensure my thoughts are not crumbled and lost?

Children as emaciated as skeletons.  Old people desiccated by weeks of starvation and years of deprivation.  Cities are devastated by civil war, rebellion and peace-makers bombs.  Emotions swell up, sympathy and compassion, of course.  But thoughts make me hesitate about a people who for more than half a century have chanted for my death.