I did not wish to dishonour the scrolls with my logic,
or David with my songs. In my work I meant to love you
but my voice dissipated somewhere before your infinite
regions. And when I gazed toward your eyes all the bristling hills of Judea intervened.
I played with the idea that I was the Messiah.
I saw a man gouge out his eye,
hold it in his fist
until the nursing sky
So I
grew round it like a vast and loving face.
With shafts of light
I saw him mine his wrist
until his blood filled out the rest of space
and settled softly on the world
like morning mist.
Who could resist such fireworks?
I wrestled hard in Galilee.
In the rubbish of pyramids
and strawless bricks
I felled my gentle enemy.
I destroyed his cloak of stars.
It was an insult to our human flesh,
worse than scars.
If we could face his work, submit it to annotation.
You raged before them
like the dreams of their old-time God.
You smashed your body
like tablets of the Law.
You drove them from the temple counters.
Your whip on their loins
was a beginning of trouble.
Your thorns in their hearts
was an end to love.
0 come back to our books.
Decorate the Law with human commentary.
Do not invoke a spectacular death.
There is so much to explain-
the miracles obscure your beauty . .
I B I
Doubting everything that I was made to write. My
dictionaries groaning with lies. Driven back to Genesis.
Doubting where every word began. What saint had shifted
a meaning to illustrate a parable. Even beyond Genesis,
until I stood outside my community, like the man who
took too many steps on Sabbath. Faced a desolation which
was unheroic, unbiblical, no dramatic beasts.
The real deserts are outside of tradition.
The chimneys are smoking. The little wooden synagogues are filled with men. Perhaps they will stumble on my books of interpretation, useful to anyone but me.
The white tablecloths-whiter when you spill the
wine . . . .
Desolation means no angels to wrestle. I saw my brothers dance in Poland. Before the final fire I heard them sing. I could not put away my scholarship or my experiments with blasphemy.
(In Prague their Golem slept.)
Desolation means no ravens, no black symbols. The carcass of the rotting dog cannot speak for you. The ovens have no tongue. The flames thud against the stone roofs.
I cannot claim that sound.
Desolation means no comparisons . . . .
"Our needs are so manifold, we dare not declare them."
It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your
distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with
numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind
of peace.
It is something to have fled several cities. I am glad
that I could run, that I could learn twelve languages, that
I escaped conscription with a trick, that borders were only
82 I
stones in an empty road, that I kept my journal.
Let me refuse solutions, refuse to be comforted.
Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat
themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
The easy gulls seem to embody a doomed conception
of the sublime as they wheel and disappear into the darkness of the mountain. They leave the heart, they abandon the heart to the Milky Way, that drunkard's glittering line
to a physical god. . . .
Sometimes, when the sky is this bright, it seems that if
I could only force myself to stare hard at the black hills
could recover the gulls. It seems that nothing is lost
that is not forsaken : The rich old treasures still glow in
the sand under the tumbled battlement; wrapped in a
starry flag a master-God floats through the firmament like
a childless kite.
I will never be free from this tyranny.
A tradition composed of the
