On Yom Kippur (Five Meditations)
Brooklyn, 2001
Maybe it’s just the walk itself I want.
The fifteen blocks alone in echoing light
could do as much as any house of god.
Across the street, an old sardarji strolls
beside his son, as if out of some film —
as if I’m watching now — his crimson turban
bobbing against the evening’s amber tones.
The son’s a shadow of his father — shaved,
short-haired, and turban-free. The outline blurs
until I see I’m looking at myself.
*
Inside, I find a balcony spot and flip
through prayer books looking for the one they’re on.
Below me, white shawls, covered heads — a scene
that should seem foreign, but I know this noise —
unmuffled conversation, song and chant
and children crying, like in Delhi, where
sitar and tabla rippled back and forth,
the audience an instrument — ah! ah! —
in conversation with the rag. So here,
the song’s almost familiar, but not quite.
*
An hour later, lost in the rising prayers,
I thumb through the translations, as if these
set down eight hundred years ago — might yield
some answer. Then they do: the prayer’s a puzzle.
I picture an old rabbi, veiled in sound,
his life spent rearranging letters till
the prayer returned to alphabet and then
unraveled into strings of words that wound
themselves to God, acrostically. I’m thrilled,
and then dismayed. This proves my fears:
Born centuries late (perhaps to the wrong sex),
I’ve missed my calling: puzzle-master, priest
in charge of letters, patterns, “sounds-like” games —
one left alone in candle-lit rooms to play
with fragments, phonemes, the parts of what we are.
*
Earlier, on the same day, we picked apples
from trees far too voluptuous (obscene
almost) to be believed, but they were real.
Apple fought apple for a bit of branch
to cling to, then held fast. They didn’t budge
through weeks of ripening. No breeze swayed them.
On one, an equally unmoving leaf
had cast the image of itself in green —
a pinhole camera: apple skin as film.
It made me think of Hiroshima, how
the victims closest to the blast left not
their carcasses but shadows on the wall.
Now, sitting in the temple, I can’t think
of anything else that’s like that silhouette
or conjure up a God whose hand, at once,
could be as heavy and as light as this.
*
The walk is three blocks down and twelve across,
past rows of brownstones joined by party walls
where conversations rise and slip through cracks
and float like cartoon bubbles, but the words
fade out to scattered sounds (ah, ah!), too
faint
to make out in the dark. The streetlights cast
their shadows down in shapes that correspond
to something, but I can’t tell what. This light’s
illuminating nothing, empty squares
that look like crossroads, crosswords. In my path,
a long, dark line gets shorter, shorter, till
I underline myself. I turn toward home
(three down, a place, four letters). After me,
the shadow lengthens, thins, and slips away.
.