Vecchia Zimarra

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. But what of God himself? What is his language? What is his pleasure? Does he meld with the lines of Wordsworth, the musical phrases of Mendelssohn, and experience nature as genius conceives it? The curtain rises. The human opera unfolds. And in the box reserved for kings, more throne than box, sits the Almighty.

He is greeted by the turning skirts of novices singing his praises as they recite the Masnavi. His own son is portrayed as the beloved lamb and then again as the shepherd in Songs of Innocence. Within an offering by Puccini from La Bohème, the impoverished philosopher Colline, resigned to pawn his only coat, sings the humble aria “Vecchia Zimarra.” He bids his ragged but beloved coat farewell as he imagines it ascending the pious mountain, while he remains behind walking the bitter earth. The Almighty closes his eyes. He drinks from the well of man, quenching a thirst that none could comprehend.

—

I HAD A BLACK COAT. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his—an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garçons overcoat that I secretly coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me.

—I don’t need a gift, I said.

—But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for.

—Then I would like your black coat, I said.

And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I put it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café. I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this relatively short span it disappeared.

—

My black coat gone, vanished like the precious league ring that disappeared from the finger of the faulty believer in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light. Then, ashamedly, within my childish mourning, I think of Bruno Schulz, trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland, furtively handing over the one precious thing he had left to give to mankind: the manuscript of The Messiah. The last work of Bruno Schulz drawn into the swill of World War II, beyond all grasp. Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat.