SHIRIM: A JEWISH POETRY JOURNAL

Reflections

As is the case with most writers, I am the least trustworthy guide to my own influences. Nevertheless, I am certain that being born a Jew was as essential to thought as being born in New York, or having read more than the usual amount of books with uncommon pleasure. I remember being puzzled by the apparent rift between my Jewish heritage, on the one hand, and, on the other, my affinities to the Classics, which were built on Greek and Roman systems of belief, and to Western literature, which was based on Christian history and mythology. The poets I read eagerly included Donne, Hopkins, Milton, Shakespeare and Herbert, rather than Solomon Ibn Gabirol, whom I read, for the first time, in translation, only five years ago. It was the working methods of Hopkins, Wilbur and Berryman, not those of the fourteenth-century writers of sonnets in Hebrew, that led me to reverse feet in iambic lines in such a way as to provide strong clusters of heavy stresses.

Early on, I was torn by the paradox of Jewish belief and adherence to the myths of Western culture. For me, the division was fundamental, for I was haunted by Caedmon, the first English poet, who sang, in a barn, of the Creation, and by Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic who wrote of divine "shewings." I could not detach myself from those figures, who populated my dreams and my waking reality.

Still and all, Judaism was a powerful influence. My earliest memories of the library in my grandfather's house include a plaque of Shakespeare; Louis Ginzberg's seven-volume Legends of the Jews, translated by Henrietta Szold; the Five Books of the Pentateuch; and an English translation of Judah Halevi's poems. I remember my grandfather's voice as he read to me, indiscriminately, from Blake, Oliver Goldsmith, the Hebrew Bible and Eugene Sue. I remember, too, going with him to a synagogue where, but for my extreme youth, I would have had to sit apart from him, behind damask curtains. There I heard the music that echoes still. It was monodic, but never mind: it carried the words it served like a messenger entrusted with news of victory.

He was my maternal grandfather, and indeed, my mother's heritage has always intrigued me. Her ancestor, Schmuel, came from Romania with the Homestead Act of 1862 to Garden City, Kansas, where he sold steam tractors and farm machines. He was a sheriff who wore a skull-cap under a wide-brimmed hat, had sideburns and a beard, and carried guns. He sent his sons East to marry in the faith, and all returned except Zavel, who remained a Jew. In my poem, Songs of My Fathers, I wrote of the passion for the law and for song, which I attribute to King David; who sang before the ark in Jerusalem. I hear that connection even in the root meanings of "enchantment" ("cantare:" "to sing"), "chant," and "cantor," my great-grandfather's occupation. In the poem I call it "that perilous song," recalling the fire, the danger, the alchemy, of those persistent notes I heard as a child.

My grandfather — the one who read to me — was a lawyer who ran a series of poetry readings in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-twenties, and included Bialik and Tschernikowsky. My father's family, on the other hand, were residents of Warsaw, and I did not meet them until I was grown. I remember my father's profound depression during World War II, when he did not know if they were alive. After the war we learned that his parents and two sisters had escaped to Israel, but that a third sister, Helen, a physician married to a physician, had preferred to remain in Warsaw with her husband and her patients. We learned also that Helen died during the Warsaw rebellion of 1943 when she leaped from a tower, her death inspiring others in ghetto misery.

In the nineteen-sixties, I questioned whether heroism in the traditional sense existed in the modern world. Because we live in a wicked system, I felt, no self-sacrificial act can change our lives. I read of a lieutenant in Vietnam who threw himself on a grenade to save his company. He was heroic in an old-fashioned way, I considered, but the true hero is one who learns to survive. Then I thought of Helen, whose act was iconic because it drew the memory and imagination to itself. I thought of Helen, but my thoughts were also engaged with a group of Green students who had confronted the junta. I knew that heroism was possible in any age.

As for my recent poem, Carrion, it has to do with cruelty that widens its net until it reaches everyone. Although it is too early to say what truths these poems carry, I suspect it is the interrelatedness of all things. Just as Judaism has taught me to praise (as in the earlier poem, Blessed is the Light), the Jewish heritage has given me an epistemological nature, a curiosity that summons me to explore what knowledge is available with the hope of erasing division and finding unity.

Poems

Songs of My Fathers
(Schmuel, my grandmother's grandfather, came from
Romania with the Homestead Act of 1862 to Garden City,
Kansas, where he sold steam tractors and farm machines.)

Sliding a skull-cap under a wide-brimmed hat,
you wore a Star of David and a sheriff's badge,
had sideburns and a beard, and carried guns.
Even in those fields you guarded law,
David before the Ark, shouting thanksgiving
for flaming words whose shadows made men tremble.

Your sons went East to marry in the faith
and all returned except my ancestor,
Zavel, who fathered caretakers of synagogues,
then resolute cantors; later, baritone lawyers.

I studied yellowed books in cloistered rooms
to find you, then I searched that woman's eyes,
her voice a battering wind. "What of the faith?"
I asked my grandmother, who closed her book,
The Range of Reason. "It is tenacity,"
she said. "The will to live, to sing, to change."

To sing. To chant. To change: cantors, cantare.
They were enchanted, turning son to fire.

I wonder, though, of others who remained,
farmers in Oregon ad South Dakota,
dancing to laws that regulate their acts.
Their flames rise up on Friday nights; they leave
chairs vacant, never dreaming of Elijah.

Sometimes they drink wine from silver cups,
singing like sea-wind, savage joy and pain
grown into thunder. They never question
why, from where, that perilous song has come.

The Law

My grandfather's mind was a covered ark
with doors that sprang shut when the truth was in.
"Pines bend with winds that snap oak.
They stand who bend before God."

Curtains and an ornamental lock
can light the law, as black soil shines at night;
dazzled by that law, I stood in wonder,
and trembled in the shadow of his hands.

Standing beside him in the synagogue,
I turned and saw a cage of women's faces —
fish leaping in nets — and one of them
my face, when I grew higher than his shoulder.

Stained glass grew leaves of light across the floor;
I saw a various truth with radiant shadows:
"Fathers, forgive me. I cannot follow."

Carrion

The chipmunk's carcass lay flat on a stone
stair that leads to rooms above the shed.
Hind legs, a tail, a strand of wine-red beads
and innards, showed whose body it had been.

One step above the corpse, a yellow cat
unfurled, his eyes half closed guarding his kill.
Caretakers had fed him well, and still
the animal had craved some swifter prey.

The cat himself, ill-used, had been abandoned.
Boarded at stables here to calm the horses,
he was released after the racing season
passed, and found a temporary home

on this estate. Later he would be free
to forage in the woods. The horse he soothed
"Would make a good breed mare when racing days
were done," the auctioneer said. Rings of grief:

Scissors, paper, rock, I sang as a child.
Scissors cuts paper that covers rock
that pulverizes scissors. Still I'm held
in the small circle, flaying being flayed.

Small fingers whipped my wrist: bland-mannered Catherine
was paper. I, being rock, would strike
my dearest Anne, with flimsy yellow hair
for being scissors. So the wheel turned, and turns.

I touched the chipmunk's glittering cadaver,
then buried it. The cat quivered to rise,
warning my hand that touched the prize he murdered.
Beyond the steps, a spruce raised votive candles.

Walking through double rows of junipers,
that day, I glanced away from cruelty,
or so I tried: a hawk warped on the wind
called back the day I watched a herring gull

circle to land, scoop up a turtle, soar
upward again and drop it to crack in its shell.
My neighbor shot the gardener who denied
they ever loved, and who was seen at Bill's

drinking bourbon with another woman.
"She seemed too old to care, too mild to kill.
She won't get off," a villager remarked,
sadly, I thought. I never knew the killer,

had seen her only, taut as a dry leaf
someone had kicked on the ground, chilly, austere,
skin of worn porcelain, her lean body
angular in stride, flexed, as in flight.

That night my feet, my elongated thighs
stiffened and went cold, my body turned
upward, and my carrion entrails
flickered below my eaten chest, my eyes.