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.

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[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.