March Poem No. 1

On Eichmann and Arendt: A Meditation

Who could be so banal, prosaic and bland

As to undertake an action of this kind.

To eradicate a people from the land

And hope the rest of us would be so blind

As not to see or hear or understand ?

We hear the witnesses long after, the skeletons

Who survived, the broken souls, the girls

And boys who grew old in horror and the ones

Who never grew, until they could un-tilt

The universe thrown upside down: the pearls

Of price made valueless, the schools built

On desert sands, the empty promises

Of ancient liturgies; and as they speak

Out of their darkness, pain and madness

We glimpse eternity and end the week

Of broken moments in creation: to bless

Such labours were a sin, to sit in silence

Another malfeasance.

               It is a time for rage

And recognition of the crime that turns the page,

As though vengeance were done and anger assuaged.

Two Daily Sonnets

The Anxiety of Perfectable Love

Nothing can be less satisfying than an argument   

so without rhyme or reason that all that was meant

disappears into absolute certainty, that one

plus one is always two, that every action has a reaction

equal and opposite, and that what is said is all

there is to say, without metaphor or midrash: the sun

will always rise, no matter what the weather, fall

brings down the golden leaves, though many hover

until the first fresh breezes of the spring,

and genial smiles play out for a superficial lover

and his mistress coy as ever, coil and spring.

Cupid’s lovely arrow never leaves his quiver

until the rhetoric has sailed across the doubtful river.

Murder, Scapegoats and National Interest

Two things so much alike, like a mirror and its image,

The perfect goats in the Temple, the sons of Eve,

The nations on either side the river, until the age

When one grows weary, the other uncontrollable;

They eye each other warily, each rolls up his sleeve,

and sets to work, and one becomes Abel,

the other Cain, one takes the priest’s red thread,

the other the hangman’s rope and romps away

into the desert until he tumbles down a cliff and breaks

apart, scattering into the darkness until dead,

thus ensuring that the crimson turns to cream; they say

he now accompanies the primate to the altar, makes

his bow and is dispatched with all our sins:

thus over there, on the other side, they remain

forever hapless slaves, while here we know the ins

and outs of everything and rule our own domain.

Daily Poem

Chop Sui Generis

They were one of a kind, the only proper way

To finish a Chinese meal, little white balls,

We called them mothballs, and to this day

There has never been anything like them: one trawls

Through history in search of something similar.

Impossible.  It was sui generis and lives in memory

Alone.  How could it be otherwise? We are

Creatures of our own experience, and chicory

Cannot be confused with coffee, pickles out of a barrel

Half-sour like nothing else, so too the vanilla

Scoops after chow mein or chop suey, the El

Overhead, the late afternoon rain, keeps falling.

It is sometime in late 1944 and we are in Brooklyn.

On the other side of the ocean, if I had known,

Uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents were murdered.

Not in anonymous millions, but one by one,

Each alone.  I was four years old, afraid

Because my mother and her mother remembered

What I had never known, could not imagine, made

Aware only decades later when no one was left to ask

Why did they look at me that way and say my task

Was to eat my food, grow strong, and be a mensch.

If I had seen the smoke on the horizon and smelled the stench

From the other side of the world, I never could have grown:

But not long after, one after another my grandparents died,

and then my mother fell apart.  I cried,

of course, but did not understand.  In a dark

Chinese restaurant, no matter where, after the chow

Mein or the chop suey, I order vanilla ice-

Cream, little round white balls, very stark,

Not kosher but still sacred, like prayers that splice

The Sabbath to the ordinary week and watch the flow

of history as Havdallah candles twist and glow.

Bagatelles from Brooklyn

Of Mice, Monkeys and Men

What is it about monkeys, mice and misery?

You want to scream or turn somersaults, to leap

from branch to branch, or cower in the corner

of your cage, or make a speech of jibber-jabber.

Animals are not people because they cannot descry

their chances in a thousand years or keep

to themselves their expectations of death, nor

hope against hope that what they dream will slabber

into tomorrow’s meal or mate, or make a speech

or declaim an oratorical excuse for who they are,

or just about anything they cannot drop or reach;

in other words, they never daven, shuckle or

mumble over a mezuzah on the door.

We can’t squeal like them, like us they cannot screech.

There is something about a mouse-trap that makes it so

endearing, enduring, intriguing—or even about cheese

that links us with those so fascinating critters,

that takes the mickey out of us, a blow

to our self-esteem, and makes our blood freeze,

yet times have changed since then, and one who fritters

away the hours playing with a mouse

has no tale to tell and cannot form ideas.

The very thought of what’s to come for us

Gives me something more than metaphoric jitters:

Anyone who wants to know or how to know

Has nowhere else to go, unless it is the slow

And tedious but time-tested process in libraries,

Book by book, word by word, row by row,

Gently down the stream, until the dream is through.

Mysterious Verses

Voracious in Berashit: A Mystery

Before there were poems there were kvetches,[1]

and before that the roaring of lions,

and even further back, before the big bang,

there were children’s whimpers and mother’s cooing;

and at the very start, before there was anything,

there was darkness and strife, as Hesiod explained.

Then came the rabbis and the exegetes,

With a different version of events,

separations and overlapping changes,

but always with a hopefulness

of extenuating circumstances:

no need for Jove or Chaos, just Law.

The world begins with a hovering pigeon,

a shifting of the basic elements,

a dance of heaven and of earth,

then gentle undulations upon

the realms of life and death

and slowly spouting seeds—

experiments unfinished in a spiral, breath

and rest, reawakened to

unfinished deeds.

And after all the kvetches of the deities,

the murders, rapes and transformations,

there came a poetry of peaceful birth,

love surpassing generation,

not sinful bodies rolling down declivities

to ugly villages and evil cities.

Verses modulated from heaven to earth

through paronomasia and alliteration,

assonance, retreat and iteration.

Crash and thunder, phosphorous eclairs,

falling cliffs and shifting continents,

liquefaction of the soil that smears,

stenches, trenches, incontinence

of selfishness and greed, and fears,

no poetry or midrash intervenes

from the other side or causes scenes.

From Omsk to Tomsk, every shtetl [2] shelters

More fools than you can shake a stick at.

From Minsk to Pinsk, like a pintel[3] that you pick at,

there are schlemiels,[4] shlamozels[5]—one who helters,

one who skelters—who flee from common sense,

Hide moonbeams in a barrel full of borsht,

who do not know their coming from their goings:

and call this poetry, then ring their bells and gongs.

We now know there are ripples in the universe.

Worm holes like ice cream swirls

wind round one another in a fatuous dance,

dervishes, sun-devils and knish-form curls,

an infinite dangling of payot:[6] and this immensity

of fervour is called enthusiasm,

or hyperzeuxis,[7] a syntactical carnival.

---

[1] For example, as my grandfather would say: Oy gevalt, gevalt, gevalt, gevalt, gevalt.

[2] A little rural town somewhere in Eastern Europe where Jews ran the olocal inn and tried to keep the drunken peasants happy.

[3] A zit.

[4] Jewish heroes who forget to wash their super gotkas lose their capes in telephone booths.

[5] Those to whom catastrophes often happen inadvertently.

[6] Sidelocks, a kind of sacred earwig.

[7] Starting off one way and finishing somewhere else, then starting again but losing the middle.

Storm of Verses

Waiting for the Storm 

The air is lugubrious with impending rain and awaits

The roll of thunder, the flash of electricity,

all promised for weeks. The heat never abates,

hangs from the drooping trees, wanders the city

like a confused old man, almost always late.

Contumacious is the night, the weight

Of contention never resolved or violence released,

Only expectations, only failures of the state

To exercise its powers, and all those dark deceased

Followers dragged by clouds across the slate

Like squealing chalk designed to irritate.

Our patience has been tested, and never ceased

Until the dawn brought dew, and dew a date

That could not fix itself, unfold what had been creased

And offer solace where everything was desolate.

In the Dog Days nothing  can be written

And rhymes back up, rhythms faltering, words mate

Promiscuously, produce sterile verses

As when a half-dozing typist dons her heavy mittens

And goes through sluggish motions—what a fate!

Lugubrious or not, it’s not epic versus

Tragedy, but comedy and farce I await.

Winter masks the carnival of ancient beasts,

The wrestling bears, the howling wolves, the wodewoses

And the gnarled old faces of the fairies, all the feasts

Of archaic ritual, all the disguises and grotesque poses,

And all the magical chants, dances and orgies,

Muffled mummery, witches, all a mockery of Moses

After his descent, the mount, tablets raised,

His eyes adjusting to the scene—naked breasts

And dangling genitals around a bovine idol—

Then everything the Law declared had to be rephrased

From shards of rage, and anger everywhere to bridle,

Thus giving to the inarticulate and bullish model

New meanings for a nameless deity,

Unrhymed and silent in the Holy City.

Two Poems in Sad Time

Life is full of all sorts of curses, pains and frustrations,

the worst are those we never hear or see until they’re gone

or we are, whichever comes first, such humiliations

sneak up in the darkness of our final hours and stone

us in public just as we thought it was time

to descend into the tomb and finally get some rest.

We parried the obvious calumnies in youth, scraped slime

and spit from our faces, burned documents and blest

our luck that no one plastered them in the press,

our foibles and sins forgotten, outlived our enemies,

then the last words we hear, almost whispered, squeeze

the body dry, twist the soul and put you to the test.

Should there be a little bell to ring out of the tomb

a signal, just in case, after our supposed demise,

to let them know up there that no one can assume

the end is really the end, and what we please

to call eternal sleep is something other,

a state of pure powerlessness and silent rage.

Will someone ever rescue us or smother

us, so that we never have to listen, age

after age, to these lies and allegations, suffer

every monstrous slander in silence—or worse,

feel their pity who condescend. What is rougher

than these infinite distortions? No curse

is strong enough to muffle them, to offer

the oblivion, the silence of rhyming verse.