To the first
You are my friend and I care
about you, have done
For years and probably always
will, but, my friend,
You do not understand nor
ever can,
Not in a thousand years, not
at the end
Of time. We meet and talk, sometimes for hours
And speak of politics and
philosophy,
Or at least, I listen to your
raves—but how is
It that you never I notice my
silences, see
How I bite my tongue, and
only later joke
About some trivial matter,
some name of one
Who no longer matters: if I
ever broke
Into our conversation—like a
stone
Through the panes of a
window, pain of a widow
Whose love was murdered, you
would never know
Only that I had broken our
trust, my silence
Necessary for our time
together, old lonely men
Chatting together as though
time were a mere pretence
And nothing passed between us
that could mean
Anything significant, my
tears my everlasting rage
Against the world that never
understands.
I listen, nod, suggest a pun,
as in a cage
A creature watches its keeper
as he stands
Pretending to sympathize with
my captivity
And share complaints about
the cruel world
But fail to grasp the truth
of such activity:
The wheel revolves forever,
age after age,
No revolution reaches the
ideal stage
When we are liberated,
workers whirled
Into the great Land of
Promise and Equality,
Finally free to take revenge
on the oppressors,
Until then frustrated and
disappointed, we
Observe the progress of the
ignorant, source
Of all our woes, until the
blows of mortality.
It is not that, my friend, that’s not why I hide
In enigmatic grin and ironic
pun. I toss
Aside the opportunity to
share with you the truth
To save our lovely chats, our
friendly hours,
Like adolescents in old
films, in a booth
Sharing a coke with two
straws. My sorrow springs
From another world, a
conversation lost
In the blackness of Chronos
whose echo rings
In a different language,
neither shadow nor ghost.
To the second…
O you do, you do understand,
very well, my friend,
Perhaps too well and yet not
the conclusions you draw,
They are too personal, your
pleas, I cannot send
Responses when you ask my
advice, my help. Before
Another word is said, amidst
the photographs
Of victims, emaciated,
mangled, disappeared
Already before our eyes, not
played for laughs
As in old movies with their
tricks—all that we feared
When seen at first now made
mundane and flat,
Masks of the grotesque. You noodge and whine
Too much. The pain is far too real, as when we sat
In the dark and watched the
vampires, the mummies dine
On corpses in the crypt—we
screamed in phoney fright—
We did not know then, and now
you do, that night
Of endless nightmares was
real, too real dreams,
And only understatement,
constrained ironic silence,
Can ever be strong enough to
gather up the beams
Of memory and shoot them into
consciousness.
You write your essays every
night, obsessed
With visions of the
Holocaust—how could
You not—but I am bothered (as
I shouldn’t be)
Because your images are too
familiar; it would
Be better (prosaic thought)
if they startled me
Out of sleep and made me hear
what I never read.
The dreams were nightmares,
ugly visions, dead
Souls forced into the madness
of the other, he
Who created Hades out of
literary corpses,
Wagnerian operas, Nietzschean
travesties
And the hatred spewed over
Goethe’s lovely pages
Until we were absorbed into
their Reich of Plagues.
If you want to daven, daven,
wind your tfillin,
And make the signs of your
devotion, chaver mine;
Believe in the Almighty,
sacrifice the sin
Away in a dreamed-of Temple:
the Prophets shine
In the brilliance of their
raging wit, the power
Of their voices transformed
to sparks of law and light.
Bench for me, my friend, at
the appointed hour
In a minyan of your choosing,
that is your right
And privilege: for me, there
is another path,
Not to righteousness or
illumination.
The road is tangled with the
roots and wrecks of wrath,
Stumbling blocks to reason,
like those one finds on
The streets of Amsterdam and
Rotterdam
Where the names of those who
disappeared in smoke
May be recalled, where tears of
pain and humiliation
Make anyone who tries to
speak, gasp and choke.
To the Third…
In the chronology of war and
genocide
the dates roll by much
quicker than the agony
but I note them in my own
childhood, decide
I was there on such a day and
somewhere by
The sea or in a park with my
mother, never then
Aware of anything amiss,
except in the eyes
Of those who whispered over
newspapers when
Someone shouted and bit her
lip, such cries
Were not for the boy to
hear. But he sensed the gist
Of something deeply wrong
with the world. The war
Meant old women fainted in
the street, and when they kissed
Him the taste was bitter,
like rotten meat, or a can
Of fish left overnight on the
counter, flies
With ugly music slopping through
blood-red stain.
