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,
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.
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