Back and Forth
Back and Forth
Ben Bag Bag said: Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein.
(Pirkei Avot 5)
Playing catch at dusk in a broke-bottle field,
two barefoot lamed vavniks—unknown—rowing
the world through the straits
to the slow drumming of mitt slap.
Each bead to its wire,
armed and incanted home
to a moment’s nesting, stitched skin to palm.
We will sum our way through night.
Porchlit at the windows, criers lure the Nistarim.
They offer food and rest to simply
bring the game to end.
Everyone else has left the field.
Unbowed the ball sets out again to cross the growing black
between two hearts upholding earth and sky
until whirr whispers up a flash
and in the web, a world,
still warm from the other's grasp,
marked by marigold and spit,
smelling of the Summer
where we first gripped then let go.
Let’s not go in yet.
I can still see.
Forgive me. I am still working on the next piece in the Midrash series. I have this little strange bit above to offer as a modest gift until I can get the longer business finished. No one has ever asked me if you can mix the myth of the Lamed Vav with baseball catch. If they had, this would have been my answer. I swear its on topic. The infinite game of dividing (as by knife) the Word, maybe?
Graham, I hear and share the refusal to be incinerated by te idea of the Tzaddik. All Tells of such stories are new wine with each speaking. The idea of the Thirty Six Just Men upholding the world must be spoken anew, and poured into a new wine skin, unmanned, re-animal-ed, and many worlded. Mybe to each of us a world, and to each world thirty six lamed vav, and so the Just become infinite and anonymous only in that which world we uphold in our turn (be we woman, whale, or wind) is unknown to us. It peoples the world in a never ending entertainment of angles unaware. Unaware on both sides of the exchange. Peace, Ego, I say to me. You too shall be as god when you no longer are.Just hold up the sky that is at hand.
"...marked by marigold and spit,
smelling of the Summer
where we first gripped then let go.
Let’s not go in yet.
I can still see...."
I've read this 8 or 9 times now, and find myself rocking back and forth, as if it were a holy wind of sunlight bent on incinerating me, were it not for the miracle that i can look in my own heart and see the entire universe there, also, rising to meet itself in the mirror of your poem -- which is to say, only by the grace of being human, being alive -- that is, being an image of the Holy One myself, even though i'm always trying to hide away and destroy myself, per the usual human tragedy -- am i able to withstand the poem, though I haven't "earned" it, and the little loudmouth of the ego, as usual, does its best to get in the way of all these vital forces...