Book of Mercy

myself for trusting you, against all evidence, against the prevailing winds of horror, over the bully’s laughter, the torturer’s loyalty, the sweet questions of the sly. Find me here, you whom David found in hell. The skeletons are waiting for your famous mechanical salvation. Swim through the blood, father of mercy. Broadcast your light through the apple of pain, radiant one, sourceless, source of light. I wait for you, king of the dead, here in this garden where you placed me, beside the poisonous grass, miasmal homesteads, black Hebrew gibberish of pruned grapevines. I wait for you in the springtime of beatings and gross unnecessary death. Direct me out of this, O magnet of the falling cherry petals. Make a truce between my disgust and the impeccable landscape of fields and milky towns. Crush my swollen smallness, infiltrate my shame. Broken in the unemployment of my soul, I have driven a wedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.

13

FRIEND, WHEN YOU SPEAK this carefully I know it is because you don’t know what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your confusion. I make some reply at every opportunity so as not to compound your loneliness. Thus the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism. If you suggest a feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. The surface is thick, but it has its flaws, and hopefully we will trip on one of them. Now, we can order a meat sandwich for the protein, or we can take our places in the Sanhedrin and determine what is to be done with those great cubes of diamond that our teacher Moses shouldered down the mountain. You want to place them in such a way that the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night, will shine through them. I suggest another perspective which would include the light of the celestial bodies within the supernal radiance of the cubes. We lean toward each other over the table. The dust mingles with the mist, our nostrils widen. We are definitely interested; now we can get down to a Jew’s business.

14

BLESSED ARE YOU WHO, among the numberless swept away in terror, permitted a few to suffer carefully. Who put a curtain over a house so that a few could lower their eyes. Blessed be Ishmael, who taught us how to cover ourselves. Blessed are you who dressed the shivering spirit in a skin. Who made a fence of changing stars around your wisdom. Blessed be the teacher of my heart, on his throne of patience. Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word. Who, in the terrible inferno, sheltered understanding, and keeps her still, beautiful and deeply concealed. Blessed are you who sweetens the longing between us. Blessed are you who binds the arm to the heart, and the will to the will. Who has written a name on a gate, that she might find it, and come into my room. Who defends a heart with strangerhood. Blessed are you who sealed a house with weeping. Blessed be Ishmael for all time, who covered his face with the wilderness, and came to you in darkness. Blessed be the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed. I was like one who had never been caressed, when you touched me from a place in your name, and dressed the wound of ignorance with mercy. Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.

Ishmael, first son of Abraham and his hand-maiden Hagar, is traditionally considered the father of the Arab nation.

15

THIS IS THE WAY WE SUMMON one another, but it is not the way we call upon the Name. We stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve the immovable landmarks of hatred. How beautiful our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity, how bountiful this solitude, surrounded, filled, and mastered by the Name, from which all things arise in splendour, depending one upon the other.

16

RETURN, SPIRIT, TO THIS lowly place. Come down. There is no path where you project yourself. Come down; from here you can look at the sky. From here you can begin to climb. Draw back your song from the middle air where you cannot follow it. Close down these shaking towers you have built toward your vertigo. You do not know how to bind your heart to the skylark, or your eyes to the hardened blue hills. Return to the sorrow in which you have hidden your truth. Kneel here, search here, with both hands, the cat’s cradle of your tiny distress. Listen to the one who has not been wounded, the one who says, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ Recall your longing to the loneliness where it was born, so that when she appears, she will stand before you, not against you. Refine your longing here, in the small silver music of her preparations, under the low-built shelter of repentance.

17

DID WE COME FOR NOTHING? We thought we were summoned, the aging head-waiters, the minor singers, the second-rate priests. But we couldn’t escape into these self-descriptions, nor lose ourselves in the atlas of coming and going. Our prayer is like gossip, our work like burning grass. The teacher is pushed over, the bird-watcher makes a noise, and the madman dares himself to be born into the question of who he is. Let the light catch the thread from which the man is hanging. Heal him inside the wind, wrap the wind around his broken ribs, you who know where Egypt was, and for whom he rehearses these sorrows, Our Lady of the Torah,