Jack Veasey's Poetry

A young poet named Jack Veasey was brought to my dooorstep in 1975 by poet Barbara A. Holland. Soon after, we published his first little poetry book, Handful of Hair. Jack left us in 2016, and here is the last book he gave us, and the world. A posthumous collection of sonnets is in the works. Now you can have the ebook for less than the price of a cup of coffee, and get enough mind-jolts to keep you awake for weeks. The cover art is the oldest-known image of a dancing male figure (the full painting is shown here, and I used the figure on the left.)

Purchase Veasey Ebook

Doctor Jones and Other Terrors

No poem cost me more to write than "Doctor Jones," a stark confrontation with a rural Pennsylvania horror: a demented country doctor who enjoyed cutting off the arms and legs of little boys. Was he real? Or only partially real? Or the imprint of unspeakable abuse? All I know is that writing it, hands shaking, was a trauma in itself, and a liberation. The second poem, "Torrance" explores, in narrative poem and in photographs, the Pennsylvania state hospital where ordinary mental patients were mixed with the criminally insane, an Arkham Asylum if ever there was one. It was a leap of imagination to place Doctor Jones on the staff of Torrance, where I made him "The Night Doctor." Meet Doctor Jones in ebook format.
Purchase Doctor Jones Ebook

August - The Silly Season, with Fascists Added

As August sets in, who wants to do any useful work? Here, "retired," it is all play (editing poetry books, creating music), but even so, I know that academic people and publishers to whom I have written and await word from, are likely at their beach or mountain houses, or traipsing through museums and sipping absinthe of an evening.
If the Republic were not in mortal peril, I could switch off and spend the "silly season" watching old movies and TV shows and drinking iced tea.
But I can't.
I don't know what's coming next, and if we don't watch out, people like me will find men in brown shirts cutting my internet cable and following me around. It will not be safe to walk past alleys.
I will have to resume plans to join the resistance, or to slip across the border, or find a commune somewhere in the deep woods.
I may have to re-learn how to build cannons.
I will have to know how many days I could live with the food in my pantry.
I will have to check in again with those people I know would hide me, and whom I would help if they were on the run and needed to establish a new identity.
I am far from the rising coastal waters, but not far from armies of Bible-waving fools.
"The silly season" is an old newspaper term to describe the nutcase stories that journalists used to use as fillers in August, when there was a shortage of hard news, and the thermometer seemed to provoke the crazies with conspiracy theories to come out from their basements. Higher temperatures also meant more crimes of passion. Plus a host of stories about people being eaten by sharks and alligators. Now the White House fills the Silly Season with endless headlines.
So, have your August fun, folks, but keep the computer on and pay attention.

Stalin and Shostakovich

What is it like to live in a country where the leader does not care for artists (except those that praise him) -- and where the leader can write your name on a piece of paper, and you will be killed? Composer Dimitri Shostakovich was just one of many who went through that hell, but he was one of the most famous Russians terorrized by Stalin. Here is the story, in a poem, from my book, Twilight of the Dictators:



STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH


It's three in the morning and snowing in Moscow.
The streets are dark--but here and there a light--
a solitary bulb throws out its beacon:
a yellow beam from Stalin's workroom,
steady when the Great Helmsman has an idea,
tilted downward as he studies his lists,
casting a shadow of his giant hand
as fountain pen
makes check marks next to offending names.

Tomorrow those names and their owners
will separate forever as People's Enemies
become "Former People."

The offices of Ministries are well lit, too--
memos to write, conspiracies to ferret out,
coffee to drain by the cup, by the gallon.
(If Comrade Stalin can work all night,
who dares to leave his tasks unfinished?)

At the Lubyanka Jail, one basement window
emits its light in slitted segments.
One could see--
if anyone dared to press his face there--
an arm with a truncheon--a mangled visage.
Dim slots of light--a doorway--come on and off.
Men in black coats are framed there.
Then slashing beams and feral tail lights
precede and follow the Black Marias.
 

2

The clock chimes four.
Another lamp is burning, too--
another hand makes nervous tick marks
as Shostakovich blocks out chords and melodies.
Even the vodka and cigarettes
are quite forgotten as the climax approaches.
Eyes blur with staves,
sharps dance like angry snowflakes.
He cannot concentrate.
Half his brain is listening.
Not to his inner Muses--
not tonight,
not any night this year--
listening for the Black Marias.
A car glides by--too slowly?
Someone is running at the end of the block--
why, at this hour?

An interval of silence--too long, too quiet.
A truck stops--how long until the doors swing wide
and heavy-footed steps
echo from the building fronts.

A street lamp winks out; across
the street a curtain parts,
a candle moves once
across a table--
is it nothing-- or a signal?

He cannot go to the window and look.
Watchers in raincoats
dislike being spied upon.
It's never wise to stand in a window, anyway:
rocks have been thrown
by zealous members of the Communist Youth
rocks with notes
that read: SHOSTAKOVICH--PARASITE--
FORMALIST!!!
What if one of them took a gun to a nearby rooftop--?
Open season on Formalist Anti-People Artists!

His hands make notes in jagged gesture.
Staccato---staccato---agitato--
Attaca subito--
 
Stalin condemned his last opera.
What will he think of this symphony --
its Mahleresque, giant orchestra,
its jarring, piled-on harmonies,
its bleak and withering quietudes?
Will this, too, be a "muddle instead of music?"
How can be help being himself? 
He writes not what he wants,
but what he has to.
He tries to be grand -- it comes out bombast.
Tries humor, only to ooze sarcasm.
He has no smile that convinces --
could a lobster smile
while dangling over the cooking pot?

He must put everything into this symphony.
It may be his last, anyway.
Ignoring the clock, he labors on.
This page: the whimper of the beaten.
There: the shriek of the victims' widows.
There: the whining voice of the apparatchik.
This horn sounds a denunciation.
This oboe betrays a friend for a dacha.
This violin divorces its partner,
disclosing her unacceptable class origins.
A clarinet warns of rootless cosmopolitans.
Let them guess what it's all about!
To hell with their need for uplift! 
Rub their faces in the ruin of Russia!
Let them try their dialectic on this one!


3
Stalin works on. He sees the name
of Shostakovich. A memo asks:
Arrest and interrogate?
"I like a tune," he says to himself,
"and now and then even a poem."
The chastised artists would come around.
They'd write their odes and symphonies
to Russia and Comrade Stalin.
They'd do it willingly.
They'd trample one another for the privilege.
No action at present, the dictator writes.


4
Done for the night, the weary composer
dons coat and shoes, tiptoes
out door to the unheated hall.
Suitcase beside him, he curls up there
between the elevator and the apartment door.
Tries to sleep, tries not to listen
to the spiderweb sounds of the dying night.
The suitcase is packed for a long journey--
a cold one.
Better to wait in the corridor, he thinks;
better not to wake his sleeping wife and son
if this is the night that makes his life
another unfinished symphony.

Sunday Organ Madness

I just posted two new compositions on SoundCloud for your enjoyment. Curiously, the two pieces are based on the same score I created in Finale. The jaunty one is a fast Little Prelude in D major, which sounds a little like a Ragtime piece.

Then, perverse creature that I am, I took the same piece, slowed it down, shifted a few voices up an octave for clarity, added some staccato accents as needed, and, lo, a full-fledged Prelude in D Major for Organ emerged.

The Little Prelude in D Major for Piano: Listen to the Piano Prelude

The Organ Prelude in D Major:
Listen to the Organ Prelude

Rutherford's Gloomy Little Preludes

A work in progress, in that it is notated, but pedaling and dynamics are not really marked up yet. This was a Little Prelude from 1968 that I expanded into a brief Fantasy around 2003. Enjoy.
Listen to Prelude-Fantasy

And here is the Little Prelude in B-Flat Major, reposted in a louder MP3:
Listen to Prelude in B-Flat Major

And here is a gloomy Little Prelude in F Minor:
Listen to Little Prelude in F Minor

Finally, as evanescent as a firefly, the shortest and oldest of all my Preludes:
Listen to A Minor Prelude

The Piano Mystery

I am recovering my oldest piano music, entering it in Finale (a music notation program), and posting them on SoundCloud to share with friends. How I came to write this music is amusing, and surprising to me as much as to anyone else. I never learned to sight-read music, thanks to a spiteful second-grade teacher who refused to tell me what I had missed during a measles bout. Before my illness, we were happily singing in C Major. When I came back, everyone was singing in other keys with sharps and flats, and I was cast adrift. None of the itinerant music teachers I had in elementary school ever realized I was faking it, and that I could not read music.
My love for classical music began during the one term of high school I had in Connellsville, in the eighth grade. Miss Keller, who was not a certified music teacher, was a volunteer who loved music and who came to the schools to teach us. Music had bored me until them. She played the 1812 Overture on a record-player, and that was it. I was hooked. From there, to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and on and on. When I started visiting Pittsburgh and had borrowing rights to classical LPs, the madness intensified. Yet I never played a musical instrument and had no access to one.
When I got to Edinboro State College, I found empty practice rooms, with pianos. One of them had a Knabe grand piano that I fell in love with. I found that one church never locked its doors, and that I could creep inside, turn on the pipe organ, and play (I limited myself to the quieter stops so that I would not disturb the neighbors or get arrested).
I sat down at a piano with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Chopin's G Minor Ballade, two pieces I knew well enough to know what they should sound like. I knew where middle C was. I knew what sharps and flats were. I made up my own system of reading, using numbers for notes instead of letters, so that I could speedily analyze what I was looking at. I used + and b for sharps and flats.
Seeing that a run of arpeggios up the keyboard was 1 3 5 1 3 5 or 1+ 4+ 6+ 1+ 4+ 6+, or  5 1 3b 5 1 3b 5 1 3b made a lot more sense to me than C E G C E G or C# F# A# or G C Eb C G Eb.
So, without any knowledge of fingering and certainly little sense of rhythm, I muddle through the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and the first page of the Chopin Ballade.
Then, mysteriously, my fingers began to find melodies, chords, moods. One thing followed another and I began to notate my improvisations. I enrolled in a Music Theory class and learned a lot in the first couple of weeks, but I had to drop it because I could not sight-read. I could play my own homework assignments, but I could not play something placed in front of me that I had not studied. So I just went my own way.
A year later, I played a full program of my piano music in front of a huge audience at an arts festival at Edinboro. Such is the arrogance of youth.

Harpsichord Sketch

Listen to a harpsichord piece I created sometime around 2003.

SoundCloud File

Annette Hayn's Last Book

Annette Hayn was born in Breslau, Germany and lived in Berlin as a child. Her schoolmates played "Nazis and Jews" and she heard her parents worry about Hitler. She attended plays and concerts at the Jewish Kulturbund, where she heard Beethoven and watched Schiller's plays. The Jewish arts organization was finally prohibited from performing works by Aryans, and their orchestra conductor, William Steinberg, fled the country. Annette's parents sent her to an English boarding school, and thus, she escaped the Holocaust. (William Steinberg went on to become conductor at Pittsburgh and Boston). She married and had children, and while her husband played chamber music, she thought she had no art. Then she found poetry. I had the honor to publish most of her books, and this, her last collection, includes her selection of the best of the early books. After her death we folded in her posthumous poems into the 2001 collection, "Chamber Music." It's one of my most unusual book designs, which you can see in the ebook in full color. And you can own it for $3.

Chamber Music Ebook 

Fourteen Poet's Press Ebooks

Over the weekend I placed 14 Poet's Press and Yogh & Thorn titles up for purchase and download as PDF ebooks. They are priced from $2 to $5. Take a peek and get a psychic infusion of poetry. 
Poet's Press Ebook Store

First ebook sale from The Poet's Press

Although I've had a couple of Poet's Press titles on iTunes, I have avoided the Kindle business at Amazon because they require that the Kindle version be the only one being offered. Now, finally, The Poet's Press books will be available at very low prices in PDF, and later, epub formats. Here's the first one, selling for a mere $5.
Tales of Wonder at PayHip

Catholic School Boys

I am having some quiet smiles as I scan a hardcover 1945 anthology titled "Speak of the Devil." It is all stories, poems and text about Satan, including excerpts from "Faust." The book is discarded from Holy Family High School Library in Massena, NY, according to various pages containing their rubber stamp. The book is exceeding pawed through by many readers, indicating that while most Catholic boys there didn't dare check it out, it was squirreled away into their rooms and carried about on various little field trips. Several pages are stained curiously and some smell of brimstone. There are some suspicious dried leaves (species indeterminate), a touch of candle wax, and a couple of penciled-and-erased attempts at Pentagrams. Ah, if this book could talk!

Mrs. Friedman's Golem

i

Because I was “the heathen boy” and smart

enough to pass for Jewish, free I ran

on the Friedmans’ neighboring house and grounds.

One early-summer day, with Marilyn,

a year my elder, we played in the pines

that fringed their leaf-filled, empty swimming pool.

An endless ball of packing twine unwound

around the spindly trees, not spider webs,

but corridors and doorways, here a room,

a closet there – in an almost clearing

a wide space for a sunbeam-lit ballroom.
The hotel dubbed “The Sunny-Day-Only”—

the sleeping rooms and beds would be up above

in tree-house heights to be scaled by ladders.

As our fancy turned up to ziggurat

heights and bird-nest bedding, we didn’t see
the bearded, smiling Mennonite preacher

until he was right upon us. “Children!”
he hailed us, then asked if we believed

in Jesus, who was up above the trees,

and died, so we could go to heaven too.
Up then went Marilyn’s defiant chin.
“We’re Jewish.” He looked at me, dubious.
“And you?” he asked. I shrugged. “So what are you?” —
“I’ve never been in a church,” I told him.

A pine cone fell at his feet and shattered.

“Don’t you believe in anything?” he growled,
now in a tone that said grownup-to-child.
“Superman, maybe,” I mocked him, and turned

to resume my arbor-building. He left
dumbfounded, his Anabaptist faith scorned

by children’s string maze in a Druid grove.

Our string hotel survived two nights, then vanished.
“My mother told me the robins took it —”
so Marilyn explained it, “ — for their nests.
Besides, the guests are coming. It’s June now,
and the swimming season starts tomorrow.”
The season, as we all came to know it,
was at the Friedmans’ immense swimming pool;

by June’s end swell, a half a hundred guests,

from wading toddlers to aquatic teens,

babies in prams to motionless elders,

umbrella-tabled at the green-blue pool.

That afternoon, indoors, we played at cards —
an outsize canasta with twenty decks,
which drew a great shriek from Mrs. Friedman
as she came home with the month’s vast larder
of picnic food and frozen lemonade.
Our task: re-separate and sort the decks
and stack them up in a neat pyramid.
Summers these rumpled cards had seen before,
beneath the hawk-eyed ladies’ gaze, enthroned
and clucking at their poolside card tables;

the cards would doubtless outlive some of them.

Scores would be there by shimmering August,
the men apart from the women, a cloud
of cigarettes where they leaned together
and worried over business and politics.
Children in bathing suits ran to and from
the house, wet trails and footprints to and from
the bathrooms, the sinks, the freezer. Sometimes
I was asked to take ice or a pitcher
to one of the tables, there where I learned
     one should never swim just after eating

     and tales of drowning, worries about
     the unfortunates who got polio,
     and Mrs. Friedman’s oft-repeated fretting
     about one bad boy who peed in the pool,
     (never enough chlorine when that occurs).


The men talked
of other things I knew nothing of
in a language I did not understand.

ii

“The season really starts next week, you see. Next week.”
As Marilyn explained to me. “Mother has asked
everyone to come over tomorrow to help.
The pool needs cleaned, the cobwebbed furniture wiped down,
Dead leaves, dog poop and pine cones everywhere. We’ll see

if anyone shows up.” — “Won’t they?” I asked. — “Not one.”

Card sorting done, we went back to our comic books:

she read my Superman, I her Wonder Woman,

a title no boy would ever be caught reading.

Saturday came. The day waned and one car only
came up the lane and parked. All day we made the ice
for grape juice and lemonade brimful in freezer

and buckets. Sandwiches were made, and snacks put out.

Squirrels came to the windows expectantly, bird-chirp

anticipated the crowd, the crumbs, the leavings.
I lingered for dinner as Mrs. Friedman seethed on,
serving cold plate with embarrassment and anger.
The guest was new, a stranger, a bearded, calm man
in a business suit they called Rabbi. His voice

was deep, and with a foreign sound I could not place.
“Rabbi Doctor Baruch,” they said I should call him.
Already he knew my name, and turning, he said:

“And you are the little boy who is not Jewish
who made string Stars of David all over the porch
December last. “I blushed, recalling Mrs. Friedman’s

horror at finding her decorated house-front.
“He felt sorry for us,” Mr. Friedman offered up,
“because we had no Christmas ornaments outside.”
They all laughed heartily. Still no one would tell me

why my six-pointed ornaments had been torn down

with such speed and alarm. “Anyone driving by,”

was all that Marilyn’s mother said, “they could see.”

“But Rabbi,” Mr. Friedman continued, “I know you wanted
to meet our friends.” The rabbi shrugged. — “You call those friends?”
his wife retorted. “All summer long they come here,
they use the pool, we feed them, and pretend to laugh
at their worn-out humor. And all this work, for what?

I could be listening to the opera on the radio.

Not one of them will come and help us clean the pool!”

“So, next week I can come back,” the Rabbi offered.
“All of us need to help Jews get out of Russia.
First Stalin was killing us all over again,

and now his heir, that smiling thug Khrushchev.”
Mrs. Friedman had other worries:
“So who’s going to clean the pool? Not you, Rabbi!
Shame on us if it came to that.” Mr. Friedman

fussed with his sandwich and fork in embarrassment.

Silence and shadow-blink of a passing cloud held us.

The Rabbi’s long-fingered hands passed twirling circles

twice in his dark beard, as though he had to ask it,
then, with one hand extended palm up he asked her,
“Mrs. Friedman, you want I should make a Golem?”

iii

Mouths opened wide, eyes wider.
Even I knew what a Golem was.
It was in the horror comics.

“A Golem,” Mrs. Friedman gulped.
“Would it — could it — ”
“Anything you want done, it can do.
It’s not an easy thing, and I need not say
that no one should know afterwards.
I have been to Prague, where such things are done.”

The Rabbi turned an intense gaze on me.
“Boy, you are not Jewish?” —
                                                  “No, Rabbi, I’m not.” —
“You are not Christian?” —
                                               “No, I’m not.” —

“Not even a tiny bit?” —

“I went two weeks to Bible School. They asked me

         not to come back.” —
“So, you are not a Christian. Swear it.” —
I cleared my throat. Whatever this was,

I had to be in on it.

“I swear I am not a Christian.” —
“Never baptized?”

I knew what that was from movies.
“No, never baptized.” —

“So, you do not know the secret name of God?”
I could have said “Yahweh” or “Adonai,” two words
I already knew from poetry. Instead I said, “No.” —

“Very well. You will be my assistant.
At ten o’clock, you come to the swimming pool. Tell no one.”

I beamed from ear to ear. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

This was better than Christmas morning. A Golem. A Golem.
They sent me home. I crept to my bedroom.
A flashlight and comics would keep me awake.

At ten, I ran alongside the Friedman house. Two cars’
headlights full beamed on the swimming pool.
The Rabbi and Mr. Friedman were up the slope
that led to the scant woods above the property.
They stooped and touched bare ground.

“Strange clay, not like back home, but it will do,”
our sorcerer intoned, as with a walking stick
he outlined the lumpy shape of a man
on the bare and eroded clay hillside,
a place I knew, where owls and wild turkeys
lurked in the shrubs and saplings.
He passed his cane this way and that,
and uttering a prayer we could not-quite hear —
it seemed to hover an inch from his beard
like a will o’the wisp — a prayer not meant
for human ears but for spirits.

And the shape he had outlined stood,
and separated itself from the yellow clay bank.
It stood. It shook itself free
of dust and tiny stones and tree-root.

It stood,
and moved no further, inert
as a sculptor’s first molding.

It was a lump with but a hint of legs,

arm-like extrusions bent at the elbow

and a great square head, two holes

where eyes should have been

and a mouth-gap the size of a mailbox.

Mr. Friedman pulled back in terror.
“I thought you were joking. I never thought.
My god, I never thought —”
Before I could react, the Rabbi had lifted me,
and placing a folded ribbon of paper
into my tiny hand, he put me up
on the Golem’s forearm.

“Put the paper in the Golem’s mouth.
Only then will he move
and obey our orders.”

I started to raise my left hand
to the horizontal gape
that was the Golem’s mouth.
His beard brushed my ear
as he whispered, “Do not,
under any circumstances,
look into the Golem’s eyes.” —

“And what would happen, Rabbi?” —

“You would see things no one
was meant to see and live.
Just do as I ask and no more,
and you will be safe, and blessed.”

My head averted, I found the mouth
by touch and slid the paper in.
There came a groan,
as low as a tuba in a passing parade,
no, low as the bass drum that rattles
your stomach in passing,

and then I was standing,
the Rabbi’s hand atop my head
for the longest time
until he let me go.

We saw the Golem in silhouette first
as the great shape lumbered
to the lit-up pool.
And so, with broom and mop
and chemicals, the hulking thing
descended the shallow-end stairs
into the vacant pool, as Mrs. Friedman,
at ease as though a local workman
were there before her, paced round
the pool and gave out orders.
Sweep there, no, higher up,
you missed a spot.

How long this took, I cannot recall.

Marilyn saw some of it

from her bedroom window,

just lights and a shape in silhouette

and her mother going this way, that way

waving her arms in command.

(Her little sister, sent to bed early,
saw nothing.)

The pool was filled, the last leaves swept

into heaps to be bagged and carted.

Then Mr. and Mrs. Friedman argued.
She wanted more done. The men were nervous.
Cars might come along Kingview Road.

So far, not one had passed.

There was that house, at hilltop,
whose windows frowned down
on all their summers, a house
that just a dozen years back
had hosted a rally of sheeted rioters,

that day the thirty thousand Klansmen
poured into town to terrify the Catholics.

Catholics then, but now the Jews and Negroes.

You worried about groups of men

riding on the back of a pickup truck

up to no good on a Saturday night.

The moonless night blazed with stars.

Shapes human and not,

moved in and out of the headlamps
as the Golem swept, and scrubbed,
and swept again. At the end of it all,
the Golem returned to the edge of the wood.

All looked with relief
at the still-black windows
of the big white house on the hill.
No light had come on up there.

No one had seen us.

Then I was raised once more
to retrieve the undecipherable scroll
that I knew, but did not tell them,
read “emet,” the word for truth.
The clay mouth was wider, deeper
than when the Golem was made,

wide enough for a small boy

to fall in and be devoured.
“Go on!”
the Rabbi chided me. “He cannot bite.
He has no teeth. Just find the paper.”
I reached, back till my elbow was wet
with clay. He smelled now of chlorine
and year-old leaves. I found it.
My fingers closed around it.
My head went back. My eyes
gazed straight into the emerald
furnaces of the Golem’s still-living orbs.

iv

And I saw everything —

A high-domed palace of giants,
packed to the walls with them,
legion of lumbering Golem shapes
impatient to be born
from a place of good deeds unbidden,
of help that could have, but never came —
the nullity of unworked magic
and failed alchemy.

I saw new kinds of geometry —
triangles unnamable
through which the news of past
and future calamities flies
like telegraphs, most sent
to wrong recipient, and read too late —
how triangles, upward and downward
formed openings how spun they formed
vast polyhedrous entities
whose facets were the insides
of never-opened geodes,
arched around gateways
of onyx and adamantine —

Vectors of force and how
to form and shape them
from nothing but will,
nudged by the eye
in forehead’s center
into a brooding shape
of inward angles
then up and out bat-winged
hurled down as a smiting force
upon the smiters —

Power I saw, but not compassion,
a dark, cold cavern
despite the light of whirling wish-forms
and the firefly storm of eyes
the color of emeralds.

v

I think I fainted.

The Rabbi, the Friedmans

stood in a circle around me.

A cold cloth was on my forehead.

“Thank God,” said Mrs. Friedman,

“we don’t have to call an ambulance.”

The Rabbi leaned down

and hissed in my ear:

“Did you see? Did you see?”

I dared not smile, despite

the exultant knowledge

that flooded over me.

“I saw,” I answered simply.

He paused, eyes shining.

“I saw … everything.”

He raised his hands in horror,

then waved two counter-circles

above my head

as if to cut a cord above me.

I went back home. I added

the Hebrew-lettered paper

to my scrapbook of monsters,

Golem marked off between

“Frankenstein” and “Mummies.”

I had an ovoid sandstone

warm in the palm, I dubbed

“The Philosopher’s Stone,”

thought it would help make

little Golems I’d shape one day.

The following week

the Rabbi ignored me

as I carried ice and card decks

to the women’s tables

the darting eyes of Mrs. Friedman

said Don’t you dare tell.

I stood off in the pines to watch.

The women sunbathed and played at cards.

The shirt-sleeved men kept apart

as one by one they came to the Rabbi’s table

and passed him envelopes, a stack

before him by the end of the afternoon.

They had done their part against Krushchev.

He watched them. 
He watched them watching

as one another’s wives dived in

to the deep end of the swimming pool.

His back was to the women.

After one walk uphill to the clay bank,

just to be sure it had resumed its previous state,

I’m sure, he went to his car. I waved.

I think he saw me. I think a slight nod

was his only thank-you. I was the clay

he could not put back from where it came.

Not to worry. I am still

not a Christian.

vi

Rabbi, The Golem said to tell you:

A hammer is as nothing

without a hand to wield it.

A hand is as nothing

without a mind to guide it.

A mind is as nothing

without the will to drive it

The will is as nothing

without the gift of knowing

Knowing is as nothing

without the love that burns

at the core of the never-dying stars:

love of what was, love of what is,

love of what can be.

vi-a (The Golem’s message in Yiddish) (tentative)

A hammar iz gornisht
felndik a hant
tsu vild es.

A hant iz gornisht
felndik a gayst
tsu firn es.

A meynung iz gornisht

felndik di vilpauer
tsu for es.

Vilpauer iz gornischt
felndik di talant
fun visn.

Veyst iz gornischt
felndik di libe
vos brent
in di harts
fun imortal shtern:

libe aoyb vos iz geven,
libe aoyb voz iz,
libe aoyb vos kenen zeyn.