She is woman
She is Schechinah,
She is my beloved,
She makes me cry,
Her tender kiss is etched in my memory
Her eyes bewitched me in their innocence
She is perfection,
The mother’s eyes drowning my thoughts
Anything resembling those eyes triggers floods of tears
If I could just kiss her eyes before I die
It would be worth it
She loves unconditionally
Despite everything I have done.
So much suffering
So much death
So many in pain
I can’t take the brutality of it,
This beautiful life
Surrounded by such cruelty,
This awesome natural world
The forests and streams
The gentle breezes and misty drizzle
Fructifying the ground
The green ferns fecund
A silent lake with pools of rings from fish
Each initiated by a bubble
A craving for breath
From the hidden below
I yearn…
In the tears is truth
Through these tears the broken heart sees
The truth
The kernel within reality
The tragedy that is this life.
As the years accelerate
Filtering out the dross
The inessential
As the decades indict the chronicles of wasted desires What is left?
The detritus?
The residue?
I am facing the brutal truth
The failures from the beginning
Jude the obscure
Outside the walls of…Oxford
Rejected as a grade B product
The indictments appear as a document from ancient times
A pre-‐determined black inked text etched in parchment
And this life has followed me according to this uncontrolled Scripted text,
As if I could not change anything not predetermined prescribed in ink
As if I had to follow the trajectory coded in these genes.
Everything seems to be seen through these dark lens
As if there is no escape
Save the image of her
She could rescue me once more
Drowning in her eyes I might once more come to life
And decide and own my future.
It all seems to come together
Triggered by her
This Lost Princess
She knows me
She knows my wound
She is my wound.
In this space
Is authenticity
The inner truth
The architecture of
The wire diagram of
The road map that has been
My soul’s desire.
She was there!
In the circle surrounding
The Rebbe,
Swaying to his niggun
He/She dances within this magol lezaddikim
Tallis covering his eyes he dances
White socked graceful ankles
Dancing slowly
Marking out Her name on the oak floor
His authenticity melts my heart
His naiveté infuriates me
His youth angers me
His unconditional love for others inspires me
Maybe he feels Her like I do?
He holds his new Sefer, (a Rebbishe one, small) embraced with deveykus
Then looks for me and hands it to me!
I hold it and him -‐they are one-‐ for this eternal moment And we dance,
Eyes closed.
For a few seconds
To be joined by the others.
This validation
Her Presence in the silent hidden spaces,
Flying in the face of my personal moral and spiritual failure Even here in
The outward social trappings of a kehilla
A standing in the community, my shtender…
The years of learning finally responding to others questions
Quickly, like the Talmud predicted
“im sh’gura be-‐piv”
people come to ask,
the answers emerge with fluidity,
they inquire and feel me out for advice
young men follow me on
our Sabbath “walkabout”
an adventure in the crisis of faith
a French menu of different approaches and texts studied.
She is present in this intercourse.
How paradoxical
For all the years
The grey hair
The assumption of wisdom
Yet the inner Kritik remains alive and well
Ever discounting
Ever judging my failure
My compromises
My ongoing betrayals.
So this is the life
My life
Facing the future
Facing the slow dying
Cells and organs
Memory loss
Bathroom visits during the night
The absent new insights
The repetitive texts
The familiar explanations and rationalizations The old excuses
Yet a wisdom grows
From where I know not
An intuition
A deeper knowledge
No books
But a certainty
Of what is
Of the nature of things
Of the divine.
Of Her.
