To the Conductor: A song of David.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
the firmament tells His handiwork.
Day on day utters speech,
night on night announces knowledge.
There is no speech and there are no words
without hearing their voice.
(Psalm 19:1-4)
Dare I begin: a song of Jacqueline?
But what, from my heart of hearts, do I say?
Not that it matters, since every line
Will murmur with the heavens, sotto voce,
The knowledgeable night, the chatty day,
Their information constant, simultaneous:
The glory of God and then His handiwork.
Indulge them: theirs is undiluted lyric
And we can’t utter speech without its voice….
So how hard could it be to write a psalm?
Think of David’s fairly modest territory,
There are other trees than cedar, willow, palm
(The handiwork of God and then His glory),
So many kinds of praise he couldn’t know:
The ferns on their unfinished violins,
The jonquils on their giddy, frail trombones,
The aspens shaking silver tambourines,
Then yellow-gold ones, then letting go.
What did David know about such changes?
The top arc of the spectrum gone berserk?
That when some skyward barricade unhinges
Without even a breath, a noise, a spark
(The glory of God and then His handiwork),
No single earthly thing stays as it was,
Except insofar as it still sings.
Hand me an instrument of ten strings;
Everything was put on earth to praise.
The crocodile. The cheetah. Hallelujah.
The nightingale. The lynx. The albatross.
The pine tree. Fir tree. Glacier. Hallelujah.
The hornet’s diligence. The gibbon’s voice.
The pale reprieve of snow. Hallelujah.
The volcano’s unrestricted exultation.
The forest’s lazy ease. The desert’s fury.
Our own extraneous efforts at creation.
(The handiwork of God and then His glory.)
The words of the Lord are pure words, refined silver (clear to the earth)/ (in a furnace or the earth), purified seven times.
Psalm 12:7
The degraded man says in his heart there is no God.
Psalm 14:1
Let’s pretend, for an instant, we’re not degraded,
That we’d know, if we heard it, the sound of pure silver
Fired in a furnace seven times.
Could it possibly be transcribed?
And if it’s clear to the earth, who needs transcription?
And if it’s furnace of the earth, why are we listening?
An earthly furnace for the words of God?
Unless David means his own earthly body,
How he crossed words out, rewrote them, seven times,
Or tried chanting them, his mouth not his,
Mumbling beneath his breath, there is no God
Unless He’s here beside me, writing psalms,
Offering a kingdom for some molten words
Perfected in an oven seven times….
Only David didn’t say that about God;
That’s an innovation of my own,
Which is why God never trusts me with His store of silver.
Imagine. All that untranslated vision,
The earthly furnace a courtesy to us,
To let us know how very lost we are.
God’s refinements always come in sevens:
Here, too, the first brought light and, therefore, darkness,
The second worked to disentangle chaos,
The third divided fluid—meaning—from solid,
The fourth made a hierarchy of brilliancies,
The fifth made portions float while others soared,
The sixth refashioned it as human speech,
And the seventh gave it poetry, its Sabbath.
Unless it wasn’t all that complicated:
God spoke to David from His holy mountain
And David was reminded of, say, Bathsheba’s bracelets
As she took them off to come to bed.
It could be a matter of wishful thinking—
My friend who swears she saw her daughter, in a coma,
Move, when she asked her to, her arm.
But who’s to say she didn’t move her arm?
That when David lured Him with his purest words
God didn’t answer from a holy mountain?
And even if pure words are an invention of desire
In the face of everything that’s horrible
(Is that the earthly furnace seven times?),
Surely they are, nonetheless, still pure….
Perhaps clear to the earth means transparent,
And all the words are written on the air,
A hundred thousand verses in the open space
Between me and these pages of the Psalms,
Each revised entirely by any passing breeze
As clouds and moon and stars plunder their silver
And sift it through the heavens seven times.
God sat enthroned on the Flood.
Psalm 29:10
You are holy, enthroned upon the psalms of Israel.
Psalm 22:4
This is the way I like to think of Him:
Not on Ezekiel’s throne of sapphires,
Which was only, after all, a likeness,
But held aloft by the religious ladies
(To whom I still owe eighteen dollars)
Who, every day, recite every psalm.
It’s how they heal the sick (they saved my niece;
Her own doctors said it was miraculous),
Though surely it can’t be just as afterthought
That they set up the place where God will sit….
And what would it look like, this throne of psalms?
All those hallelujahs must be pillows —
Each one filled with cures for every malady
And hand-embroidered with a joyful noise—
The massive frame, the echo of God’s own voice
Shattering Lebanon’s unlucky cedars.
For decoration, there would be the letters:
The exotic shin with crowns, the ornate tzadi,
Arranged as leaping mountains, harps on willows,
Floods clapping their hands, upright palms….
Unless it is those floods that are His throne.
I was never wild about that line,
But you can’t really argue with destruction
And anyone can argue with a psalm.
A flood will diminish, on the other hand.
And who’s to say what happens to a psalm?
If Noah had written one before the Flood
(Instead of getting so involved with gopher wood)
God might even have changed His mind
Or the music might have served as a distraction,
Which means, it seems to me, we’d better start singing
Or I’d better send those ladies my donation.
You know, the other day, that massive hurricane?
God just needed somewhere to sit down.
Or maybe—who knows?—He started thinking
And tears began to fall. It’s not unusual.
He didn’t even notice as they fell
And then—He had no choice—He blew His nose.
He never meant the dying and destruction.
All He wanted was a little praise.
He mounted a cherub and flew, He swooped on the wings of the wind. He made darkness His concealment, round Him His shelter—the darkness of water, the clouds of heaven.
Psalm 18:11-12
You will light my lamp, illuminate my darkness.
Psalm 18:29
I’ll tell my daughter
Don’t be afraid
It’s only God
Hiding Himself
No need to worry yourself
About the dark
Imagine He’s a rider
In a thick black cloth
What would lurk
In such a path?
And if she asks why God
Needs a hiding place?
Whom He’s hiding from?
Who would know His face?
Do I tell the truth
Or keep it simple?
I could quote the psalm
For example
Fiery wrath
Wings outspread
Why the cherub?
Why does God
Need a ride?
And what’s it like
Mounting a cherub?
Does he buck
And flail his wings
Or nod
And glide?
And where
Will He alight?
Does He go far?
Maybe at the center
Of a dark ex-star
Whose energy?
Gravity?
Is so compact
It’s far too strict
To let out light
A lamp unto my feet Concealed in darkness
A light
To illuminate
The dark
A whirl of black
Its mass
So dense
That it was once
Pure light
Is God concealed?
What do I tell
My daughter?
If the light’s let out
What exactly is revealed?
Darkness of water
Darkness of cloud
Don’t be afraid
It’s only God
Nourish yourself with faith.
Psalm 37:3
Just a little longer and there will be no wicked one; you’ll contemplate his place and he’ll be gone.
Psalm 37:10
I was young; I’ve also grown old, and I’ve never seen a righteous man forsaken or his children begging bread.
Psalm 37:25 and
Birkat Hamazon (Grace after meals)
All those boys who’d started heder at three,
After licking a page of letters smeared with honey,
Who, legend has it, by the age of ten,
Could track the route of an imaginary pin
Stuck through the Gemara, word for word—
Surely it was nothing to the likes of them,
Who clung to every holy thing they heard,
To learn by heart the words of every psalm,
And surely, even given the odds, one,
Despite his scholar’s pallor and his puniness,
Made it, by some miracle, to the workers’ line
And didn’t go directly to the gas.
What I want to know is: could he have tried,
Before his slow death from starvation,
To bring himself a little consolation
By reciting all those psalms inside his head?
Just a little longer and there will be no wicked one
He’d murmur to a shovel full of ash,
You’ll contemplate his place and he’ll be gone.
Unless he was too busy saying kaddish
For his father—lost a few days before
Along with his own reservoir of psalms,
Still stunned by the crudeness of the cattle car,
A man known to go hungry giving alms,
Who’d walk to shul the long way, on a muddy road,
So as not to crush a blade of grass on Shabbos—
Was he to say his father wasn’t righteous
That his only son should go in search of bread?
Though the psalm does say begging bread,
And begging was of little use at Auschwitz:
There, you had to have something to trade—
A sock, a shoe, a blanket, cigarettes—
For what someone who did favors for a dishwasher
Had managed to scrape off dirty SS plates.
Our scholar wouldn’t eat—it wasn’t kosher—
Though the rules didn’t really apply at Auschwitz;
The Torah, after all, says, to live by them,
You can even eat vermin in the face of death;
But our young man kept singing that one psalm
Over and over: Nourish yourself with faith
(Is that why David says he’s never seen
The children of the righteous begging bread?
They’re meant to be sustained by faith alone?)
And was our scholar, singing that line, comforted?
And his fellow prisoners? Could they have heard?
Did he sing the other psalms or just that one?
Maybe all the psalms had left his head.
He’d contemplate their place and they’d be gone.
I could try asking my father-in-law
If, in all his years at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
He ever once overheard a psalm.
But I know the answer, just imagining him
Giving me the slightly baffled stare
He keeps in reserve for these conversations
That says: Where do you find these foolish questions?
And then: How could you know? you weren’t there;
If I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t believe it either….
Aloud, he’d tell me: Psalms, I didn’t hear,
You were lucky to put two words together
Without some SS screaming in your ear,
But this was nothing. This was nothing.
Most of his descriptions end like this.
He almost never says what something was.
Whatever it may have been, he’ll always sing
That bit about the children begging bread
When it’s quoted in the Birkat Hamazon.
I refused to sing it as a kid—
Though, unless you’re counting television,
I could honestly have said I’d never seen,
Or known I’d seen, a single person starving—
My poor rabbi found me so unnerving
When I’d balk at his effort to explain
That the line wasn’t meant to be historical
But something to hold onto as a dream.
I love to sing it now—only a fool
Would try to be literal about a psalm—
But then I’d argue: but it says seen.
The past tense. A single person’s life span.
Read it. I’ve been young and I’ve grown old.
Even now, singing it, I’m still compelled
To wonder what the line’s supposed to mean.
Maybe the key word really is seen
And David’s trying to make us a confession:
That, for all his affect of compassion,
He never, even once, bothered to look.
Or maybe it was just that he couldn’t see.
A man who, as a child, with a sling and rock,
Could conquer a nation’s greatest enemy….
A slingshot at Auschwitz? Can you imagine?
Though once, in a film, I heard a Vilna partisan
Describe his girlfriend crippling a Nazi train
Loaded with guns and bombs and ammunition
With a single handmade ball of yarn and nails….
But that was only one Nazi train.
She did, for a week or so, tie up those rails,
But, before she knew it, trains were running again,
Taking whoever hadn’t died of gunshots
In graves they’d dug themselves in nearby woods
To slower but less messy deaths at Auschwitz—
Some with entire books inside their heads—
And what I’m saying is, there were so many of them—
Let’s forget about my scholar with the shovel—
I’ll admit it; he had no thought of a psalm—
But think of the others, many religious people,
Standing there, waiting in the other line,
First, for the barber, to have their hair cut,
Then, for whoever did the tooth extraction,
All these things took time; they had to wait.
I know it sounds crazy, but couldn’t one of them —
Not that it matters, they all died anyway—
But still, so many people, and enough time
For reciting what the dying are supposed to say
(Hear, O Israel, et cetera) and a psalm.
Or not even a whole psalm. Just one line.
All those people waiting. Couldn’t one of them
Have mumbled to a brother, a father, a son
(The women, of course, were on another line
And this was not a psalm they would have known),
Just a little longer and there will be no wicked one;
Just a little longer … he’ll be gone.
To the Conductor, a plea to be spared from destruction, by David, a michtam (Psalm 57:1)
And suddenly what I’m reading is a michtam.
I look at a number of English versions—
Not knowing what a michtam is—and every
Last one of them—some still collecting royalties—
Tells me what I’m reading is a michtam.
Oh, thank you, King James; thank you, Rabbi Hillel
Danzigher; thank you, translation committee
Of the Jewish Publication Society;
But couldn’t you do a little better than michtam?
Luckily, the Hebrew-English dictionary
(The Alcalay, a three-volume set)
Through which I always travel very slowly,
Says: epigram, aphorism, golden poem.
And mentally I write a thank-you note
To Mr. Alcalay: My dear R. Alcalay,
If there is ever anything you need —
A letter of recommendation, a poem,
Advice on the niceties of English —
Please don’t hesitate to ask me.
And another one to Rabbi Danzigher,
With a duplicate to JPS:
Though it’s a bit expensive, I’d direct you
To the Alcalay Hebrew-English Dictionary,
Where it says that michtam is a golden poem,
The very phrase my bubbe would have used
If she’d made it to a hundred-one;
In her no-longer-thriving native tongue
There is no higher praise than goldene.
On the telephone, she would have told her friends,
Though she’d have understood barely a third of it:
You should see my Jackie’s golden poem.
To my bubbe, I’d have written michtam
Upon michtam. Who decides when it’s a michtam?
Maybe the person who wrote down the psalms
Was actually Obed, David’s grandfather
(His grandmother wouldn’t have learned to write
And, anyway, we’re never told her name)—
So dazzled by the apple of his eye
Who sang his alef-bet at eighteen months,
The Song of the Sea, by heart, at three:
Conductor, hear my David’s golden poem.
Was David thinking of him when he wrote
May you look upon your children’s children?
You made it, bubbe, even if your boys
Were not quite olive plants around your table,
Though one was a hell of a basketball player,
And my father, the goldene neshumeh,
Would walk around the house reciting Shakespeare,
Though now he claims to need help with my poems—
He’d understand if I could write a michtam,
But I can’t do better than a michtav,
Of which I’ve written more than a fair number.
Maybe, since a michtav is a letter,
A michtam’s an epistolary psalm.
It’s not a bad idea, a letter to God:
You could collect your thoughts that way
Or, better yet, decide not to send it
As I decide with nearly all my letters,
Or sloppiness dictates, since I lose them all,
Or am incapable of having stamp,
Letter, envelope, correct address
All in the same place at the same time,
None of which is necessary for a poem.
But what is required of a michtam?
A living grandmother? a ten-string harp?
What’s missing from the last three thousand years?
A Jesuit priest, in the Anchor edition,
Which I smuggled from the synagogue library,
Suggests that michtam means inscribed in stone,
And while I have nothing against Jesuits—
Indeed, I’ve always thought they think like Talmudists—
This is not the meaning of a michtam. …
The words of a michtam are pure gold
Inscribed with the feather of a turtledove
On parchment from the skins of newborn lambs
Immaculate enough to serve as sacrifices
As the sun goes down on Hoshana Rabba
(With ivory altars, knives of beaten gold)
And one more book of life is sealed for good.
Or perhaps they place their impress on the wax
That seals the book, or other vital messages,
Unless, of course, they’re not inscribed at all
But clamor when the sunlight on still waters
Gathers in the willows’ fleeting gold
Just before they weep themselves to sleep
Or rise out of the lai, lai, lai’s I substitute
For a lullaby’s forgotten Yiddish lyric
Though most of the children from that noisy world
Who wouldn’t go to bed without its golden tune
Have already fallen fast asleep.
VII (MICHTAM/DOVE/DISTANT SILENCE)
A michtam; on JONATH ELEM REHOKIM (loosely, the dove of the silence of the distance)
Psalm 56:1
My wanderings You Yourself have numbered, place my tears in Your flask, are they not in Your book?
Psalm 56:9
Our great Rashi says the dove is David
(Defenseless before his Philistine captors,
The note continues, like a silent dove).
Another rabbi says a musical instrument,
And the King James, ever graceful, just gives up:
To the chief musician upon JONATH ELEM REHOKIM.
The JPS’s rabbis do the same thing
But add my favorite scholarly note:
Meaning of the Hebrew uncertain—
A sentence calling out for poetry.
Who will blame me if I get it wrong?
I can’t do as badly as the Artscroll edition,
Which calls it the distant dove of silence,
Or the wishful Jesuit of the Anchor version,
On the lookout, I suppose, for the trinity
(A dove in paintings means the Holy Ghost)
Who calls it the dove of silent Gods.
Take my word for it: it’s a misreading
And David must have known his Hebrew grammar—
Unlike the rabbi of the Artscroll edition —
There’s no way that’s a distant dove
The dove of silence beyond reach
The dove of silence inaccessible
The dove of the silence of distances
The dove of the muteness of the distance
Oh, but surely this is Noah’s dove,
I’d know him anywhere, his baffled ear
Still a little startled by the soundlessness
Of a dazed world emerging from a flood.
No one would ever count his wanderings
Except for a single vocal olive branch,
And as for his tears, if a dove cries tears,
They fell into the not yet quiet sea….
And if it is a musical instrument,
How would it sound, this dove of distant silence?
Do you blow against a reed or pluck its strings?
And another question: who wrote that bit
About wanderings numbered in a book?
Is someone here pretending to be David?
Samuel 1 and 2 weren’t written yet,
Unless—who knows?—David wrote those too,
Afraid that no one else would get them right….
Though his I could just be the Jewish I
Of the exhausted ex-slave in all his wanderings,
Since, in a brilliant propaganda coup,
We’re obligated yearly to insist that we
(And not just our fathers’ fathers’ fathers)
Were brought out of Egypt by an outstretched hand
(I for one could swear that I remember it—
Or perhaps it’s the ten commandments I remember—
I was very young and there was thundering
And then a soothing sound, like far-off doves).
Of course he must be talking about the Torah,
But what about this flask? this tear-filled flask?
What would God want with such a thing?
Unless it’s the secret drinking source
Of the dove of an evanescent hush.
Maybe someone else did write this poem,
Some musical prodigy who knew how to play
The dove of inaccessible silence,
But first he had to string it with purple threads
Unraveled from a high priest’s holy garments
And tune it to the bass note of the twisted horn
Found tangled in a thicket near a rock
Where a mosque would one day quarrel with a missing Temple,
And where, if He’s anywhere, God hovers still,
Collecting samples for His flask of tears.
Unless the instrument’s not stringed at all
But a complicated flute: mother-of-pearl
From a chambered nautilus that Jonah pulled
Out of the whale’s belly as a souvenir.
It makes a high, transparent, cooing sound
But only with a reed devised of bulrushes
Salvaged out of Moses’ makeshift ark
Or a braid of Absalom’s unwieldy hair….
The dove of a silence beyond reach
The dove of not quite certain sacred tongues
The dove of numberings, of wanderings
The dove of branches undeterred by floods
The dove who gathers tears in a heavenly flask
And uses them to cleanse a distant instrument
Which, when he holds it, sometimes sounds by accident,
Its unimaginably subtle notes
Diminishing with each new rank of cloud
Until even their soundlessness is lost to us
Except as rumors in sporadic drops,
A shade impure for their celestial task,
Falling back, unsure of what they’ve heard.
VIII (AT THE GALLERIA DELL’ACCADEMIA: PSALM 51)
Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will tell Your praise.
Psalm 51:15
Is that what he’s saying? You can’t be sure,
And this isn’t the usual stance of prayer;
Still, it’s what I hear as I look at him—
Not that he requires any psalm—
But here they all are, as yet unwritten:
The cedars whole, the mountains motionless,
The oceans’ hands unruffled by applause
And stirring anxiously within the stone
Their soon-to-be-discovered hallelujahs….
I say the slingshot is a metaphor,
That if there’s any sign of a Goliath here
It’s that once undifferentiated block of stone,
Which seemed to utter, from its holy mountain:
Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean
(After Bathsheba, the psalm says, the ordeal with Nathan,
But this David is clearly thinking of Jonathan),
Wash me; I’ll be whiter than snow.
And he is, except for a disintegrating toe
Left to stand too long in the open air—
Which, with the softness of his open face —
Makes him look peculiarly defenseless;
He doesn’t really seem like any warrior
Though I used to think I saw ferocity
In his profile (his full face held the poetry);
Now I see it’s all diffused by awe
And the still unsorted-out intensity
That hasn’t yet come up with hallelujah
Or calculated what it takes to climb
The as-yet-uncharted mountain of the Lord;
Only Michelangelo has figured
That out. But when you look across the room
You see that his solution didn’t last;
He grew impatient with his own perfection—
As if he switched allegiances to Samson,
Wanting not mere giants but a whole foundation,
Even if it meant that he, too, would be lost—
And gave up easy strength to try to excavate
Some dim volcanic memory in the stone.
Was it worth it? The David’s more famous
But think of what it took to call away
A face like Matthew’s from that unhewn stone —
Or for these prisoners to smuggle out
Even a hint of torso, shoulder, thigh….
Each is a definitive self-portrait,
More accurate, surely, than the Nicodemus,
Who grieves above Christ dying down the street
With a pieced-together misproportioned arm.
Maybe it’s just Christ’s arm he’s grieving for;
Michelangelo smashed it with a hammer
(He still required perfection; I was wrong)
But after his death, someone mended it
And, from many angles, it’s sublime,
Though Michelangelo was right; the arm’s too long.
Who knows? Perhaps he worried about the psalm:
Eyes they have, but they see not; ears they have. …
He’d meant that Pietà for his own grave
But who was he to give God’s son an arm?
Or maybe, old now, he’d reread each psalm
And realized he’d even gotten David wrong—
This boy would never cry: O Lord, how long?
Or notice the groaning of a prisoner
Even across a room—gasping for air?
Or prying lips apart to mouth a prayer?
IX (LOOKING THROUGH THE WINDOW: PSALM 121)
I will lift my eyes to the mountains, where my help will come; my help from God, who makes heaven and earth.
Psalm 121:1-2
Was it Jonathan Edwards who’d repeat, continually,
One verse from the Song of Songs for an entire day?
I am the rose of sharon, the lily of the valley.
He believed that, in the repetition,
He could hear Christ’s voice replace his own.
And while a god who’d use that kind of self-description
Would put me off—mine asks sarcastic questions
Like Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations?—
I’m also given to wild expectations.
Here’s my secret: help does come
When you invoke it with the hills or even hum
The melody for that one bit of psalm.
It’s the sheer idea of lifting up your eyes,
The heady speculation that the mountains rise
Purely for the sake of lifting us,
As if the endless business of creation
Required even our participation.
But wouldn’t we know it? It’s a wild notion;
Besides, it’s no mean trick to lift your eyes
And I’ve been making an untenable promise
In my impatience to repeat the phrase
That requires nothing of me: help will come —
It is an extraordinary claim—
I will lift my eyes to the mountains —pure momentum
Could make anything happen after that—
Unless it’s part of a triumvirate:
Lifted eyes, my help, the mountains’ height—
All approximations for the undiluted
And various emergences of God
A little like gas and liquid and solid
Versions of something wholly without substance.
But then—is it my failing?—there is a chance
That all I’ll know of real deliverance
Is these blue-white mountains out my window
Still reeling from this morning’s blast of snow.
They’re uncannily beautiful without the Hebrew
So why don’t I leave well enough alone?
Surely it’s enough: a diamond-studded mountain.
Why insist on making it a stand-in
For what, if we could lift our eyes, we’d see.
(What help do I need? What is wrong with me?)
A lifted eye, a lily of the valley.
X (SNOW PSALM, TO THE CONDUCTOR,
ON JONATH ELEM REHOKIM)
For this, we’ll need our doves again.
See how they have turned the sky their color,
Tempering the air’s reluctant pallor
With a gray, iridescent discipline,
As if each cloud’s escaping cargo
Had a fringe of doves on its circumference,
Wings arced at a respectful distance
From the unsuspected resonance of snow—
Music of hexagons? Music of whiteness?
Music of a heaven’s hardened tears?
Music of the calm interstices
Between the shedding sky’s abandoned layers,
The willows’ fallow harps restrung with snow
And hills awakening their instruments
With variations on a rumored silence,
Its feathers’ shallow plunge, its startled coo.
Yakov Glatstein already
used this verse in a poem,
translated, in that book
(Radiant Jews, 1946),
Dead Men Don’t Praise God
and you can see how, then,
it must have seemed that, for years,
this verse had festered in its psalm
waiting to reveal its acrid heart.
I don’t blame him if he thought
all praise had ended
but I wonder if it’s heartless
after only fifty years
to think — again — the praise has just begun:
The dead don’t praise God,
or the ones who go down to silence,
but we’ll praise God
from now on forever
hallelujah—
I’m not suggesting that we think about it:
just sing it, during Hallel,
at synagogue, the next new moon,
of its stubborn bravado,
its delirious proof
of itself—hallelujah—
which, in my opinion,
explains the annoying epithet chosen
that has caused us so much trouble over the years
(though there are a host
of twentieth-century explanations:
chosen for suffering, for near-annihilation,
or—on the other hand—for the idea
of public ownership of means
of production, relativity,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu).
I say: chosen for this
tenacious language,
to be the we who get to say this word
and live forever,
and it makes me pity Handel,
gospel singers, televangelists—
belting out their hearts for a borrowed word—
when I have the whole thing,
one hundred and fifty psalms,
every single syllable a hallelujah
and not—you have to understand—
an English hallelujah
with its vague exultation and onomatopoeia
but a word composed of holy signs
that could actually spell God’s name
if they weren’t ordering the universe
to praise Him.
There’s a story my friend Isaac tells
before he reads Akdamut on Shavuot:
how the poet Rabbi Meir ben Yitzhak
first wrote Akdamut in Hebrew
and the angels stole it away, page by page,
so he had to begin all over again,
this time in Aramaic,
to keep his genius secret from the angels.
I want to know how David
got away with it.
Were the angels just so riveted
by what they heard
that they left him to go on and on and on?
(With Glatstein, there wasn’t any problem;
they were probably in stitches:
this poor shlemazel writing
in an instantaneously dead language—
irony’s the soul of Yiddish—
dead men don’t praise. …)
As for me, though it’s my new goal
to have a page or two stolen by an angel
(it would have to be—let’s be realistic—
a fairly boorish angel, not much of a reader,
the eyes on his wings pressed shut,
so addicted to watching television—
mostly telenovelas—he knows
the English language by osmosis).
I don’t figure this page is in imminent danger.
Maybe, reading over his shoulder,
the angels rejected David’s poem
(didn’t they have enough of praising God?)
or maybe—that’s it! — it was they who fed him lines
(Do you think this kid will really take over? hallelujah!)
or maybe it’s nonsense about the Akdamut …
there was no Hebrew version,
are no angels …
and my hallelujah,
my precious, rising hallelujah,
doesn’t have the stamina
I need it for,
has, in fact, been burned away
before it could adorn a single tongue
for countless generations of David’s offspring
and I’m not talking about the ones who turned to ash—
they’re around somewhere, singing hallelujah—
I’m talking about the other ones, numberless as stars,
who never got to sing a word at all:
of permutations of permutations
of pairs of double helixes,
singular and brief as snow,
among the double helixes that burned,
every one an unrepeatable
and complex promise,
and, among them,
certainly, at least
a few who might
have liked, even for
an instant, to live forever.
The heavens are the heavens of God, and the earth He gave to man.
Psalm 115:16
They will fear You as long as the sun and moon endure.
Psalm 72:5
Scientific evidence is nothing to rabbis—
Bring them some ancient rocks, carbon-dated,
And they’ll say so God created the world old …
(I mean, of course, the ones who still insist
That fifty-seven-hundred years ago the Lord created
Everything in seven days, including rest),
And the rabbis have a point—though I’m not sold—
Since what are a couple of allosaurus vertebras
To a Guy whose single word produces light?
My Hebrew teacher told us about a Yemenite
Who, against the solemn oath of television,
Dismissed the moon landing as a fraud.
The heavens are the heavens of God,
And the earth He gave to man was his position—
He needed a different kind of imagination
Or, at least, a better definition.
Earth means whatever’s given to us,
Which now includes the moon and, shortly, Mars.
I’m inclined to welcome the new expanse
Since, otherwise, this is all there is,
And I like picturing myself among the ancients,
This English of mine a language safely dead,
And schoolchildren uncertain whether Xerxes, El Cid,
Or Jimmy Carter fought the Trojan Wars,
Giggling, no doubt, at the ridiculous lengths of time
It took our crude machines to get to Saturn …
Relativity, if not utterly forsaken,
Evolved into a simple grade-school theorem.
(Amazing what such primitives could discern!)
Why should our particular errors last?
And what chance is there, given our record in the past,
That, in anything at all, we’re not mistaken?
Is accuracy that heaven, only God’s?
Don’t laugh. It isn’t utterly impossible;
Who’s to say it doesn’t exist somewhere,
A place, by definition, inaccessible,
But pleasant to believe in, nonetheless,
Since, if it existed, God would also be there,
And maybe even—though I’m not laying any odds—
They’ll end up finding Jews in outer space,
In some backwater galaxy, studying Torah,
Not a single word diverging from ours;
They’d be up there, oblivious, thinking theirs
Is the heaven and earth Moses was talking about.
And why not? Maybe ours is a dry run,
It would explain that line about the moon and sun—
Why would God rely on such ephemera?
He must be banking on that other planet.
There could be a spare Jerusalem just sitting there—
No suicide bombs, no checkpoints, no soldiers—
Its Holy Temple still intact!
And we could do an airlift of the Lubavitchers;
We’ll tell them Rabbi Schneerson will meet them there,
Most of his disciples are already packed.
(He’s expected to rise from the dead
Any minute now—real estate has skyrocketed
Around the Queens cemetery where he’s buried;
They all want to be first in his entourage.)
We’ll send along sufficient stores of kosher meat
(They’d never trust the butchers on another planet)
And stones, in case some women try to pray….
It beats coming to America in steerage,
Not quite as crowded, if a bit more hurried,
And, in terms of going home, no farther away….
But where did this come from, wasn’t I writing
A poem about how we can’t know anything?
(Not, admittedly, the most original subject
But one, it seems to me, you have to face.)
Still, when there’s no sign of an obliging muse,
If you’ve got to be wrong, you might as well be funny;
And even if a muse showed up now, I suspect
I wouldn’t have the heart for the uncanny
Intimacy of what would have to follow—
That is, with any muse who pulled her weight.
I’m not entirely ready to disintegrate
In the face of the encyclopedic darkness
Which is — isn’t it? — my subject here:
A nothingness so stringent and so thorough
That it conveys intelligence, however imprecise,
Of just how comprehensively you’ll disappear.
Is it possible you don’t know what I mean?
So familiar, so regular, it would be comforting
If it didn’t bring such undiluted terror—
Which is where this religion stuff comes in;
It has an obsessive way of diverting
Your attention, and, though it’s anybody’s guess,
The rabbis have put three thousand years into this
And I don’t much go in for trial and error.
Besides, imagine actually believing
That the old bearded rebbe to whom my grandma used to point
From her Parkway bench on Shabbos afternoon
(Not that I knew which guy in a black caftan
With a big black hat and long gray beard she meant)
Is going to rise from the dead and take me with him—
I, for one, am quite attached to living;
Don’t think I wouldn’t be tempted, if he came,
To sit in the women’s section for all eternity,
A wig on my head, my knees and elbows covered….
On second thought, some fates are worse than death.
Sorry. Enough jokes. I take that back.
I believe—despite my weakness for a wisecrack—
That something or other has to be revered,
And the truth is I envy those people’s faith
Even if I do think they’re all meshugene
And, worse, true enemies of peace;
But I’m not talking politics in all this darkness.
I’m just looking for a little light,
And please don’t point me to those fly-by-night
Creations: the stars and moon and sun —
As far as I’m concerned, their deadline’s passed.
God, was there nothing tougher you could give to man?
I’d so like something that will last.
Let stars reverse their courses—hallelujah—
Let planets flaunt their necklaces of ice —
Let suns confound eclipses—hallelujah—
Let moons’ scavenged radiance rejoice—
Let galaxies recluster—hallelujah—
Let nebulae uncloud and celebrate—
Let meteors spread banners—hallelujah—
Let black holes unleash astonished light—
Let comets jump their orbits—hallelujah—
To jangle inadvertent atmospheres
With rumors of the distance—hallelujah—
Anecdotes—songs—suspicions—prayers