Big Man, Part III
Poets who talk about their poems should be jailed. If they had more to say they should have put it in the poem. And if what they wanted to communicate was articulable in ordinary language, why resort to poetry in the first place?
I’m ashamed of the times I’ve tried to explain a poem. It’s like trying to explain sex or death or moonlight to a toddler or an engineer. It’s like dissecting the Torah with an Exacto knife. “I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write,” Bob Dylan told a room full of reporters in 1965. “I just write them.”
But there are stories.
My dad once roamed Jerusalem in the summer with a wheelbarrow or a pair of nylon shopping bags and brought back beautiful stones he’d collected from who-knows-where. They were translucent white or jagged gray or sometimes a luminous pink. Some of them looked quite ancient.
Maybe he stole them from construction sites. Maybe they once held up the walls of King David’s court. No one knows. It was his own private magic. He brought them home, and with great love and precision fitted them together on the dirt ground of our tiny front yard. Within a few months we had a courtyard fit for desert kings. Then he made a sukkha with grape leaves for walls, the vines twining through and around a delicate trellis he’d built. He made our home exquisite.
Other times I wanted to kill him. I stumbled from his table and into the night gnashing my teeth and choking on nothing for he wouldn’t or couldn’t see me.
Now I miss him.
Big Man, Part III
vii
At Carmeli Elementary you played
the cracked upright for
thirty tiny Israeli savages,
violent, sun-burned wildmen wont to
howl or claw at anyone at all,
and yet you
sat stately
before Carnegie Hall.
Your leather shoe over the rusted pedal
was a harpoon poised over a whale,
your fingers meteors rending the sky,
belying any claim
that you cared nothing for
cities or lights or dreams.
And so you disclosed to them a light
so strange, so exiled,
they couldn’t possibly have understood it,
and yet they did understand, and more deeply
than any Upper East Side arbiter of taste
or discerning old shmuck blandishing his way
through the fêtes of Park Avenue.
Our sandy hearts leapt.
viii
You built a temple of grape leaves,
a floor of stones. You set the arches of the firmament,
and beneath them tendered word-talismans,
dubbed me a night sorcerer. You ambled through
Galilee while we, your children, your saviors,
whirled round you like four moons.
You talked endlessly, your feet
angled absurdly between the thistles,
directing the paths of owls
with your ravenous and itinerant hands.
ix
Long ago you
sought to be filled,
gave up, and then,
in the shadows of a parlor I never knew,
decided I could fill you —
I, your own trembling embryo,
helpless to fill anyone with anything,
fated to stagger a maniac path
resolving finally in the broken baby
you’d see before you now
had your eyes not melted away
with the gold coin I’d slipped
into your breast pocket
as you murmured one last time:
When I die please bury me
in my broad-brimmed Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
And say I died standing pat
x
I embarked from the port of your night
into seas so opaque not even the gulls
could make out their own faces,
not even in the stillest lagoons.
And though the moon
was more electric
than a new lover’s face,
I couldn’t see it,
for my eyes were your eyes,
laughing, beaten,
a sinner’s eyes.
Finally, in order to exist, I disappeared.
What a crime
to row soundlessly away
from the ship that carried me.
“To Bohemians,” you scrawled
in the coffee-stained memoir
you never finished, “Don’t have children.”
But you traded your cafés and velvet suits, didn’t you,
you carthorse, you fountain, you family man?
Did you smile faintly on the rain-swept deck
as my lifeboat inched toward the horizon,
happy I was for a bigger world?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
Leaving home is leaving home.
xi
You drew me into your kingdom
but would not enter mine;
my dead satellite shuddered
for a drop of true stardust.
I never begrudged you your
Magic Theater. I was a patron.
But I wanted one.
Your holy visions seethed
with centipedes.
You clung to the sleeves of
Solomon and Ouspensky,
then spat in their wine
like some gangster.
You sneered at trying,
but oh how you tried,
forever cursing
your own credulity.
You were modern, clear-eyed,
ecstatic, deep-fried,
physician, desert king,
jester of charms and alarms
any child would disdain,
giver eternal of time and of gold,
miser of the light of the soul.
You cursed the pallor of winter,
then soaked it in gore.
You tuned in and turned on like no one before you,
then thrust pins into accountants
shuddering under tarpaulins of money.
What were you? Was your
blood made of oyster shells?
Were you a tyrant, a failed magician, a wolfman?
Was there in the end
only the forest from which you fled,
you fugitive, you fiend, you frozen, seething hypnotist?
Long ago you sought to be known (I know),
gave up, and then,
in some mirrorless cavern I never saw,
decided I could know you —
I, your own creation,
your magic glass,
Ancient of Gods,
a rebel without a shoe
fated to hobble across Mordor alone,
this very one you’d see before you now (surely)
had your eyes not burned away
in the fire as I wept
one last time:
Lo Julesy
A complete unknown
A Magic Man
Christ & Harold Hill
Behold Julesy
Maketh a splash
Wherever he goes