Back to library.
Back to homepage.
Email
feedback to the author.
And trailing behind all that green din and tumult,
like some forgotten kite's tail, left floating with the mylar
in the sky moving over the trans-ams and mopeds,
past, flailing, almost, wanting to digress into a flourish--
came this slowly spinning red, drifting less purposefully
than the days I spent when I was young,
when there was no time to speak of, when it was all quieted,
not in some mystic vein bulging blue into the tendons
of this world,
but in the dull white interlocutions of the television set,
its chatterboxes turned to anthems and then to rainbows
and then to this.
Somewhere the blood in his veins has spun counterclockwise down the drain,
rinsed off the latex gloves of the chaver kadesh,
having sorted through these hairs and this flesh,
and determined,
with the latest scientific technology,
the amount that goes where, and to whom, and to her, and to him,
as the faucets runs thick like a snake in some half-forgotten myth
speaking, not babbling as they're said to do, shouting a language
that asks not to be understood, as the interpretation
of a color makes itself trite, bland with balding innuendo,
reminding its audience of a pale old playboy, slapping the
tight figure of a giggling whore. Quiet, then!
So it moves counterclockwise, like these phrases circling around the
dead, a vulture with a beak like an Israeli crow,
peering from the top of a bauhaus building,
at the overabundant cats screeching at each other, each one lunch.
These lines try to devour the dead, but the dead always gag back.
It moves counterclockwise, the day turned opposite, the masks worn
but not undone, the burial shrouds turned into party togas,
this wine and bread turned well enough to chips and beer,
a drinking, drooling fraternity boy giving a eulogy,
the girls all are wearing tuxedos,
a truck driver nurses his baby boy,
the ice-cream vendor has taken over the shoestore,
raising his empire among the pumps and tongue-pads,
a shrewd, calculating salesman, high on his hat at last.
Willy closes up shop while Yitzhak mops the floor,
Abram's wife rests with bits of rock and soil,
what God has given, the janitor sweeps away into the fuming dustpan,
and carries into the glad bag, incinerated, or buried, or both.
A watch's gears, frozen at 6:45 one morning, the hands moving backwards
like Mickey Mouse, pointing towards a broken wrist, grasping another,
for just a second, did they know? Did they have a moment to look
at each other before it all went backwards?
So many questions, save them for tomorrow, rest your tired eyelids.
You can count on tomorrow not being yesterday before, you can trust
in the second law, the arrow may miss the target but it won't jump back
at you, nothing you to undo it, a crumpled failed photocopy,
overblack with toner, coming off on your hands,
thrown in to be recycled, its words smeared and unreadable.
They may read right to left, or have left to write, or they may be white
fire on black, they will be washed away and turned to pulp
and then carry sales orders, slips, balance sheets,
binding them like tendons by a wrist with a watch on it.
The blood washes off too, and carries words on it, phrases that
snap at each other like snakes suddenly biting the hands that
hold them, recycling protein into protein. Their tendons also
hold together paper, binding books with glue, an old man's hand
shaking as he does it, in Jerusalem.
You can buy his product at the gift shop, and give it to your grandmother
waiting back in a warm, wet climate. She will keep it past its usefulness,
putting it away for safekeeping, like the thousands of pitchers and
sets of silver in major museums, doomed to never be used, always waiting.
Or you can think of him as finally not waiting anymore,
not relaxing on the bridge of a canoe, not waiting for more time
to attack the day and live an iamb or trochee, the wait is over.
No, he has all the time in the world and nothing to wait for.
And firing after all this green and tumult and red and spinning,
and after all the quicksand poured like white paint on the heads of
fixed-place settlers, after all this corroding turpentine, all this
acrid-smelling bleach, the day turned itself on its head,
fifty more went to somewhere else, the enemy held the day,
and the day spun around like a young Michael Jackson, still black,
still dancing his virgin-pure form around, the day became a clown,
dressed in red and blue motley, smiling obscenely like a born-again
Christian, inviting every passing Loman in with a grin and
a southern drawl. Bozo's bright red hair sticking straight
out sideways like payot plugged into an electrical outlet,
the payot of the man of the chevra with his latex,
which keeps his hands condom clean of the blood and crushed teeth
he scrapes up from the side of a building,
careful not to let his long beard become clotted in with the rinsing
blood in the sink, or wet from the faucets shouting white noise at him,
his long-accustomed eyes still hesitating a tear.
Did they have just a second in that backwards moment, on their
way to the bus south past the Dead Sea and rose-red Petra,
to look just long enough to turn their heads towards one another,
one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, matching unison with itself,
just for one second--so they knew?
Fifty or more, with the dread of children gone,
thousands aright the tilting canoe by the bridge
and deliver a right, a left, backwards in mechanical motion,
like the woodsmiths chopping upwards in the swiss clock in the square,
pantomiming the furious noise from the gears and bells and springs.
So much for the concantations of bliss, so much for Robert Browning,
so much less remains than what was red and glistened before.
So much life and time and past and bookmarked sources
for passover stories, Purim spiels and random lots
had long since stormed the stage.
He'd taken their victory from them, he'd forced the show again.
The fool elects himself general, the boy wears a flowered dress,
a dead cousin on a motorcycle, a gold and green hill, charred a little now,
with a pair of olives high on pedastals and a kid throwing a rock
and a large painting saying 'this is not a rock, this is not a kid,
these are not olive trees, this is not tomorrow backwards' in backwards
alphabetical acrostic, listing thousands of names of God sung out of
the gaping mouths of old angels, in low Tibetan voices, not a harp
to be found, a lizard rises in eastern Pennsylvania, the fork runs
off with the nails, flies stop moving, shuttling back and forth, another
old seasoned political machinist visits a tent out of Lawrence of Arabia,
invoking King David and his love of Jonathan, and begins to speak as he
drills, sounding like a faucet spouting arbitrary holy water from the
overwalked Galilee that washes down the plasma of God's most devoted,
off the gloves of a nearsighted man with sidecurls, the fool assassinates
the learned, the boy wears a flowered dress, the day is backwards again.
The bed is turned upside down and no pebbles are found,
it was something else that was bothering her,
as she hadn't won the beauty contest this time:
she wasn't there in time to save the good guys.
He is so stoned he doesn't know Haman from Marduk and life,
he hangs by fishing line, a sinner in the hand of an angry god,
and builds a small gingerbread house in his spare time.
The rock, the paper, the dinosaur and scissors, all turn to each
other and say good evening, morning light. The blood runs
counterclockwise at six in the morning, on a mistridden wet field,
twenty kids running laps around a baseball field from home to third
to first, the commentary is read before the primary source:
Rashi says this word must remain unexplained.
After all this irony and discontent, swirling itself in
a forest green pool, after all this flying shrapnel
that does not cohere,
the red tail thinks it has caught onto something going somewhere,
a ball hit by a cricket bat,
held by a white Englishman who views it with favor,
flying through the air like a mylar balloon,
but as he delivers a right it swerves to the left, and as he grabs
with his left it just slips out his grasp --
did they have just long enough to say "I"
or even long enough to think it --
did he wonder if it was worth it, the long hours,
the living for something, which it had to have been,
if only for this fourteen year old child
who wears his uniform to a party, like a burial shroud,
and vows that he too, will dare to be a poem,
written in verses not pointing backwards like snakes
but in short pure words that shine like radiant blue,
the brightness of the firmament,
that he too will do this, and to know that he can,
in his counterclockwise motion,
bring past to bear on the yet to become,
and honestly set back the clocks to straight again
and redeem this spilled red counterclockwise blood
to describe a path aright again anew.
Back to library.
Back to homepage.
Email
feedback to the author.