Some Thoughts on Leonard Cohen's "You Want It Darker"
Somehow Leonard Cohen made peace with the Kali Yuga before his death on November 7, 2016. He did so by facing God in his/her/its third Hindu manifestation (many-fastness), as Kali--in Kali's time. You have probably seen Kali in her modern-day breakfast-of-champions representations as a sort of super-woman, a sometimes-black and sometimes dark-blue-bodied goddess who wears a lei made of skulls (Kali-flowers?), disco-dancing to welcome the dead (mostly heroes) she escorts to the afterlife. When she is not acting as escort to the newly, usually bravely dead, she keeps Shiva, supreme Hindu masculine god known as the Destroyer, tied to her apron strings (Shiva apparently has apocalyptic-magnitude anger-management problems). It is no coincidence (to me, at least) that Jews also call their period of mourning, Shiva, and play Kali to the Shiva in them by sitting for seven days until grief is tolerable. In Hindu mythology, Kali is pictured, or depicted, as keeping her foot on Shiva's chest to render him latent. "Be a dear, Shivvy, and fetch some more canadel."

The point I am making is this. If there is to be belief in God in this century when genocide is the leading international pastime, that God would have to be Kali-&-Shiva-like and, as Leonard Cohen says, wants things "darker."  Are you ready for that? Cohen was, or tried to be. I am not.

You Want It Darker
Leonard Cohen
If you are the dealer, 
I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, 
it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory 
then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning 
for the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission 
to murder and to maim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Ah! Such a post-Auschwitz song, one fitting to serve as the opening theme for Netflix's new miniseries, "Black Earth Rising," a searing drama about the Chinese box of interlocking evils known as Rwanda--a country synonymous with genocide. Note that Cohen feels asked to be a "willing executioner." In each verse of the song, he refuses. But finally he bows (like a Buddhist?) to pressure and repeats Abraham's surrender to Yahweh. Of course, God browbeats him into submission before he utters the word he uttered when he agreed to kill his son, Isaac: "Hineni.” In my street-wise translation from the Hebrew this means, "Whatever you say, Lord." Traditionalists translate the word as, "I'm ready." Ugh! For what? A day or night or lost weekend of slaughter? Just how far are you willing to go to prove your faith in the father (mothers rarely ask for things so drastic as killing).

And here is where and why the story of Abraham and Isaac is so befuddling and beguiling. God, in his profoundly petulant bi-polarity, shames the prophet for even considering sacrificing his son. "What are you doing?" he screams. "Your bidding," Abraham stammers. "My bidding!" God thunders. "What kind of God do you think I am?" Indeed!
Maybe Yahweh is Zen's First Patriarch. Maybe there is no right answer. Stop at the first beckoning to kill. 

Maybe the son-sacrifice story is a koan which Abraham is prevented from answering wrong. We used to try to console ourselves about Abraham's aborted infanticide by rationalizing that it was a story about breaking all blood-ties in pursuit of the True Father. If so, the story is a kind of a low-lumens beacon for faith that is rewarded with last minute intervention. Not surprisingly, that intervention is rare. How rare? As Cohen sings, “A million candles burning / for the help that never came.” Yes, this God wants things "darker." But do his children? Do I or you need to pray away our atheism or homosexuality?

Pre- and PostLapsarian Life
According to Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition, we are postlapsarian beings. "Lapse" refers to the Primal Big Thud, or Fall. Through faith, we try to gain prelapsarian equanimity. That ain't easy at 77. So what's a poor old boy to do? Surely not to play in a rock and roll band. So what then?

So glad 'you' asked.

Cherry-pick the traditions; find the ones-in-a-million that got away and learn their escape tactics and exit strategies.  
As you know, I'm not on the best of terms with my natal religion: Judaism. In my obstinate opinion, it has been corrupted and corroded beyond recognition by the same nationalism that almost destroyed the Jewish people between 1941 and 1945. Now, like the sons of alcoholic fathers, Jews have become the fathers they should denounce and quarantine. But like those abusive fathers, they have learned to demonize entire populations and dehumanize them to the extent where (in Israel's case) slow-drip extermination is possible, even preferable to the imaginary annihilation they fear. 
“Tradition!” the "Fiddler on the Roof" song mockingly proclaims. No wonder. Ezra Pond defined tradition as "the inherited imbecilities of the past."
Yet I want to make peace with Judaism and see this as an increasing possibility, even a plausibility. How? In my case, it has meant coming to terns with this religion as a Reader's Digest condensation of Hinduism. As in Hinduism, the Jewish God is a compound deity, composed (for personification purposes) of multiple personalities--all of them able to manifest with impunity. Seen in this light, the Christ story is about a largely unsuccessful attempt (Jewish in origin; possibly early Freudian) to curb, if not cure, what we now call "dissociative identity disorder," to place him and us under some benevolent Prospero apotheosis of character. Ariel and Caliban living in one dominion (psyche). 

Old age is giving me the gift of pluralism. So let us look at God's worst-hair days through a bifocal lens. In monotheism, Noah's ark is lifeboat for a few sanctified (sanctimonious) survivors. Evangelicals, you might say. In polytheism, however, it is Noh play for a rescue ship sent to tundra lands to feed caribou-loving arctic natives their favorite foods during the hardest winter of all time. In the polytheistic telling, Noah is bringing humanitarian aid--on the terms of the people who need it. He doesn't dictate those terms. Very Hindu. Very U.N. And maybe, after all is said and done, very Jewish.

Faith as a Flagellate's Black Hair-shirt or a Monk's Saffron Robe
Throughout his later life of melded Zen and Judaism, Leonard Cohen was intent on keeping faith intact. I admit it is a hard faith to keep--harder than the hardest Siberian permafrost. My faith is one suited to times of global warming where faltering on the gleaming ice is the straightest gait I can manage. But I deeply admire Cohen for his endeavor. It is, for me, the most courageous public spiritual quest of this century.

In my own attempt to meld Zen and Judaism, I have demoted the Fall of Man to a Pratfall, and wondered if it was God or a Goliath god-man (mentioned in Genesis) who placed the banana peel or roller skate on which Adam slipped. It's pretty shabby, but 'pun' takes the pain out of 'punishment'. Or does it? Leonard doesn't find it funny, just grim and ironic.

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission 
to murder and to maim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

This is where I draw the line: that genocide happens with "permission." Sorry, folks, but there is no way this could ever make sense or be excused. That's believing in a '”false god." Your God’s arm is that of a one-hand-clapping one, not made for boxing with his short-handed subjects.

Look, folks, maybe atheism is God's greatest parting gift to mankind--part of a metaphysical immune system. It’s message might be a simple, “Don’t look back.” The present, unflinchingly perceived, will tell you what to do next. Imagine one of Job's comforters who is also a standup comedian, telling the greatest Victim of all time, "What? You refuse to stop believing in a schmuck who floods the world because he's pissed at the tribe or rapes 16-year-old teenagers just because he has a sudden whim for fatherhood. Fool! Curse God and see what happens." If you've ever read "The Blue Cliff Record," you would know this is how equally endowed Zen masters regularly talk to each other. Otherwise, or should I say, other-than-wise, I would continue to practice conversion therapy to hold on to an ex-mavhina god despite my intrinsic, fully justified skepticism. Like any other cult member, Atheism was as much anathema as homosexuality to the elders. I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting who I am, or asking anyone I love to fight who they are.

Fight the natural urge to give God the middle finger, I was warned for decades. On the other hand, my father taught me that that was the highest and best use of the middle finger. But I was at war with my Communist-turned-Zionist father. So I stubbornly maintained belief that every lapse in faith, every invitation to disbelief, was an arcane test ordained by God. I was to fail each test and keep faith. In what? In faith itself. Koan = Cohen. 

My spiritual life was, shall I say, masochistic, although it was rewarded with insights that I still apply to daily life. 
God knows, I always tried to keep the latest faith I studied. I was, to recapitulate a cartoon I saw recently, at the uppermost bow-tip of the sinking Titanic, believing I was closer to heaven than the sea. Today seeing any sketch of the last moments of the Titanic, the ship's almost-vertical profile obscenely reminds me of men bowing in prayer in a mosque. Ass-up to God, I think, and shudder, still sometimes asking the ghost-limb God for forgiveness at such a grotesque association between prostrate men and sinking ships. Once back on their feet, many of those "submitted" (i.e., devout) would feel duty-bound to kill their own brothers and sisters for bringing the disgrace of unwed pregnancy or homosexuality on their families. I watched as the mosque I once attended forbid professed gays and lesbians from attending prayers. I watched as friends who hated this violation of human rights continued to attend prayers and to make excuses for the community they had become. What was I doing in a mosque in First Amendment America?
If this is the price I must pay to keep faith, fuck faith. Or fuck faith with a denominational name.

Where Do I Go from Nowhere?
My spirituality is, I realize now, forever traumatized. So was Cohen's. To believe in God means to believe in ultimate, explicable 'containment' of all that exists or has ever happened. As spiritual aid, we call that sphere of containment "Le Mystery." Of course, we expect that mystery to be solvable--if not by us, by a few avatars; if not in or by Life than by Death. Every time I hear a man of the cloth swear that God has a presently unknown (or unknowable) reason for evil, I sicken. Everytime I hear the mother or father of a victim of a Gaza shooting say “All praise is to God,” I want to explode. Clinging isn't faith. Evolution needs rotten apples for ripe ones. But I don't need to live in a Manichean world for that to happen. I need a more collaborative kind of duality--one in which humans recognize and prevent the damage they do to one another. You can't do that in a segregated universe.

Nevertheless, I have come to hate religion. But so many people I know find it the best source of identity. No religion per se, but membership in a religion and, if needs be, obligatory attendance at high holiday services. You know, just in case. Jack Spicer wrote, "If you don't believe in God, don't quote him." But the non-believers quote words attributed to God or his messengers. Personally, I don't think God is needed to make Christ's injunction to turn the other cheek as many times as there are beads on your rosary or abacus any wiser. When Christ says, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," I realize that exhortation is the best antidote to evil ever prescribed. Just count to one and stop there. My guru taught me that most (not all) evil is projection of what we fear and hate in ourselves onto others. He knew the meaning of "plucking out one's own eye." But he also knew there were creatures beyond redemption and that they roamed this earth--to be avoided not rehabilitated. Creatures like our current president.

Look, I'm a Jew for Jesus, but Jesus as a reformer of Judaism the way Buddha was a reformer of Hinduism. I don't need Christ to be lynched or tried and convicted for the sin of proclaiming the only God is within as pre-existent Good. I like the idea that messiahood is only a satori flash away, attainable by any and everyone. Like Jesus, I'll talk to Gentile or Jew, man or woman, with equal amity. And I hope Jesus has a girlfriend who, if, as despicable rumor has it, is a whore, is like the 'escort' Julia Roberts played in "Pretty Girl." Richard Gere is a Buddhist and this movie makes perfect sense for him.

Polymorphs and Poor-In-Spirit Unite!
If you must find a religion, find one conducive to the hardcore, often grisly complexities of life. In hindsight, I think my guru was more of a Hindu than a Muslim. So I advocate a compromise religion based on polytheism (not just Indian but Greco-Roman). I lived in a Hindu ashram where God could be worshipped in the aspect of your guru's choosing. (Guruji always knew best, right?) My first live-in guru chose Hanuman, monkey-god who was a celestial Congressional Medal of Honor holder. Every morning I asked Monkey-Man for the strength, bravery and fortitude he symbolized. We bathed him every morning; offered him fresh fruit (no, not bananas)--but hoped that day he would be spared the need for heroism. I have muddled my deities. It might have been Ganesha, elephant-God of wise choices and good luck. All I remember for sure is that we bathed some animal deity.

Then, after that guru was exposed as a predator, I switched to the ultimate conversion therapy: Islam. I tried to be a mono morph and deny my polymorphous perverse nature. Freud was right about the reality of human beings and human nature. Some say he was a secular chassid. Could be. Certainly, my guru was a Zen-like mischief-maker. He deplored religion every day, then, in 1983, built a mosque where he naively hoped out loud and in print bar mitzvahs could be performed. I realize now he wanted his mosque to be more like a Hindu or Buddhist temple. I think he knew his chances of those hopes being realized were nil because after he inaugurated his mosque in May 1983, he never attended it again (he died in early December 1986). Indeed, he left his students free to choose to spend nightly prayer time with him or in the mosque. He personally told me to come and act out (silently, of course) my inner craziness in his presence and under his protection, which meant sitting quietly with him (usually in his bedroom). But I tried to be a Muslim, learning just enough surahs (chapters of the Quran) to satisfy ritual requirements. Four, to be exact. In Arabic. No one dared to recite them in English.

I haven't been back to my guru's ashram in several years. I get the shakes when I go. Honestly, I do. I sweat.  Besides, my mosque is homophobic. I would be betraying too many friends and principles to return. But even if I could, I don't think I would do so.

No, I'm trying to live a life on what both my guru and Walt Whitman called "the open road." It isn't easy these days. Lots of storm-wind branches and other forms of debris litter it or long stretches of it spend weeks in submersion. The bars where I could take refuge are all showing sporting events or superhero movies. So I take refuge in my home, practicing a meager half hour of Zikr nightly, and trying to manage late-life penury.

Leonard Cohen has been very helpful in conducting this stay-at-home, shut-in life. It is he who helped me realize what Christ meant when he said “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.” He is talking about the spiritually battered like Cohen who continue to “serve” against all reason. “You want it darker,” he sings, Hineni, hineni / I'm ready, my lord.” 

Service for me is to fight for reason and against religion to preserve a collective, expansive consciousness in which all are welcome (except the predators). I don’t need a one-size-fits-all spirituality. I realize I am “poor in spirit” and try to make do with my fevered thoughts. Reason is a seasoned bitch. Thank God! Occasionally, I peek in on my inner Isaac, who has forgiven me my wayward moment on the mountain and even tells my friends that the man with the dagger in the air pictured in my Yearbook doesn’t look a bit like me. “Don’t go so easy,” I always tell him later. “You were just following orders,” he answers, “like every other father I know.”

3 Trips to Lord Jesus's Blood Bank: "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?"

Anyone who has seen "Night of the Hunter," the 1955 film starring Robert Mitchum as a psychopathic preacher in pursuit of two children, will remember him constantly singing, "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms [of the Cross]." Well, it turns out the hymn was written by a Pennsylvania Presbyterian minister, Elisha Hoffman, in the late 1800s, composer of what must be a one of the stoutest Guinness Book of Records, 2000 or so. Among Hoffman's other notable hymns is one with equally gothic associations in my mind, "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" 

The reason, besides the mere fearful idea of drinking or drowning in Christ's cleansing sacrificial blood, is its, to me,  sardonic use by Charles Ives in his 1914 song-setting of Vachel Lindsay's poem, "General William Booth Enters Heaven." The poem was written as an elegiac ode to General William Booth, the British Methodist minister who founded the Salvation Army in 1865, and became its first commander ("General") in 1878--the year Hoffman wrote "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" Booth died in 1912 and the poem, written that year, gained instant popularity when published in 1913. Throughout the text, there are numerous references to Hoffman's hymn.

Lindsay's poem has always had ambiguous motives and meanings for me. In it, he describes Booth leading a ragtag army of bedraggled sinners and sufferers into Heaven where they are greeted by Jesus who transforms them into what might be called "heavenly sights for un-sore eyes." Booth, whom Lindsay notes "died blind," does not "see" Jesus come out "Stretched . . . hands above the passing poor." Instead, he leads "his queer ones / Round and round the mighty court-house square." As if impatient with the lack of what should be, I imagine, instant recognition of and salvation by the Lord, Jesus simply does a mass healing of Booth's "blear review" and they march on "spotless, clad in raiment new." There, for me, is the appeal and danger of evangelism. Christ is, to these believers, a carte blanche savior of souls. "Sin now, don't [have to] pay later."

Jesus came from out the court-house door,    
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.    
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there    
Round and round the mighty court-house square.    
Yet in an instant all that blear review    
Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new.    
The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled    
And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world.    

Ives did not set Lindsay's entire poem (apparently he used an excerpt that he saw in a newspaper review of Lindsay's book which contained the poem), but he is literally faithful to the instructions he saw and to the spirit of the poem. Every recurrence of the refrain "Are you washed in the blood . . ." clashes with the song, which ends with one final repeat for the listener, as if to ask, "And what about you?" Ives was a deeply religious man and his music is studded with hymn quotes. But there is a savagery to his setting that makes me wonder if WWI had something to do with the composition. Booth's bedraggled band would have been joined with thousands of civilian and soldier dead--and Christ's endless blood bank would have been seriously drained. So it is hard for me not to see a double diabolical meaning to the idea of "army" in Ives' adaptation. The booming bass drum is certainly militaristic in this composition.

Okay, why, out of the blue, am I sending Charles Ives' "General William Booth Enters Heaven"? You have my Vancouver friend, Danny Kasowitz to thank or blame for this. Last night, after watching a new Paul Schrader film, "First Reformed," Danny sent me a version of "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" by the Antrim Mennonite Choir (1).  I don't know whether this is taken from the soundtrack or not, but I'm sending it as an MP3 file. To give the hymn context, let me quote from the movie's on-line publicity site, which says the movie is about "Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) . . . a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities and 5,000-strong flock." 

It had been years since I listened to the hymn, and then only in a 1927 "roots" version by Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters (2). These straight versions--the first exuberantly reverential and the second rustic and rollicking--beckoned me to excavate several versions of Ives' song. During archeology, I discovered an orchestral arrangement by Ives' close friend, contemporary, and fellow composer, John J. Becker, written in 1934 for baritone, chorus and chamber orchestra. Ives, who had long tried unsuccessfully to set the song for large forces, must have been elated. The arrangement is much transmission as transcription. Thomas Hampson, who has made frequent recordings of Ives' songs, is the featured baritone. 

Get ready for a transmogrification of Hoffman's hymn. Three versions of "Are You Washed In the Blood of the Lamb?" await you here:

https://we.tl/t-fY1ZDb5IvC

General William Booth Enters into Heaven

BY VACHEL LINDSAY

[To be sung to the tune of The Blood of the Lamb with indicated instrument]

[BASS DRUM BEATEN LOUDLY] 
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.”    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,    
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,    
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—    
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:—    
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,    
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    

[BANJOS] 
Every slum had sent its half-a-score    
The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.)    
Every banner that the wide world flies    
Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes.    
Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang,    
Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang:—    
“Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”    
Hallelujah! It was queer to see    
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.    
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare    
On, on upward thro’ the golden air!    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    

[BASS DRUM SLOWER AND SOFTER] 
Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,    
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.    
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief    
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,    
Beard a-flying, air of high command    
Unabated in that holy land.    

[SWEET FLUTE MUSIC] 
Jesus came from out the court-house door,    
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.    
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there    
Round and round the mighty court-house square.    
Yet in an instant all that blear review    
Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new.    
The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled    
And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world.    

[BASS DRUM LOUDER] 
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!    
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!    
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,    
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!    

[GRAND CHORUS OF ALL INSTRUMENTS. 
TAMBOURINES TO THE FOREGROUND] 
The hosts were sandalled, and their wings were fire!    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    
But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.    
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)    
O shout Salvation! It was good to see    
Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free.    
The banjos rattled and the tambourines    
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens.    

[REVERENTLY SUNG. NO INSTRUMENTS] 
And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer    
He saw his Master thro’ the flag-filled air.    
Christ came gently with a robe and crown    
For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down.    
He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,    
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.    
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 

YOU ONLY LIVE THRICE

1
Once in the rarest of whiles
you crack
                an egg
with a double-yolk.

Cotton Mather said
such things
are Signs
meant for pondering
by the beholder.

Be held by what you see
if needs be

all

day

and

night

or however long

it takes

to be known.


2
The double-yolked egg
was instant correlative
for the twin despairs
of my life

1    as Jew
2    as American

yoked to Zionism
yoked to the idea that my country would one day
stand for more than
war and rapacity


3
Zion has long invited puns
involving cyanide.

A Jews-only paradise
was to my Communist college rabbi-mentor
a world where liberated Woolworth's restaurant counters
paid secret homage to the racism
that led to their occupation.

Israel was cheating, he explained:
Sure, you can order coffee and a sandwich,
sure, you can be assured of seating,
he said,
because our people own the place.

What do you mean? I demanded.

Freedom based on exclusivity
is a form of anti-semitism
that denies a nostalgia for captivity. 
This makes every Palestinian 
a Jew-in waiting
living under permanent, perpetual curfew.



4
By 1967
my father had switched his heavenly residence on earth
from Moscow to Tel Aviv.

During the Seven Day War in May,
he turned his study into a war room.
There he pinned tiny Israeli flags
to each new stolen sector
of Palestinian land
on a gigantic map.
When you turned on a fan
the flags fluttered
and sounded like pinwheels.

I objected by telling him
that Israel had used napalm
in support of land gain.
The blood drained from his face
and went into the fists
he raised to my face.
We Jews fight honorably, he screamed
his breath meeting mine.

He was still stronger than me then.
If we had come to blows,
father would have vanquished son.
But my dad was also a Liberal:
We Jews leave the dirty fighting 
to the Americans in Vietnam.



5
Vietnam was still common ground
to spit on and despise
while my father and I fought bitterly
over Palestine.

Why don't you ever call it Israel? he would chide.

Because it isn't, I would always answer.

It still isn't.  And now
will never be.



6
So we shared the deep-shaft sorrow
of America
until his death.

Colonization of Palestine
never tormented him as it tormented me.
In time, we learned to stop talking
about what I once told him in anger was
"the Jewish solution to the Jewish problem."
I expected him to curse me for saying that.
Instead, he conceded my irony.
After 5000 years we Jews have finally taken matters
into their own hands, he said.

I reminded him of Partition.
Didn't they try that in India? he asked caustically.
And what did it get the Hindus? 
A bullet in Gandhi's head and rioting Muslims.

He was shot by a Muslim, I corrected.

My point exactly, he said,
Partition was and always is a mistake.
One nation, one people. 
Every people need their own flag to salute.




7
I visited the Wailing Wall in May 1987,
2 years before my father's death.
A rabbi kept offering me a yarmulke
and urging me toward the wall.
I watched as dozens of Jews
dobbined and banged their heads against its stones.
They seemed to stand captives to their cries
as if being Jewish was like living in solitary confinement.
I wondered
as some stuffed letters between crevices
who collected the daily mail
to ancestors
and when.
The wall seemed the ruin
of a post office
no more prophets
would use for special delivery
or deliverance.


8
I fled the wall,
barely able to stifle my disgust.
Why do they cry and carry on like that?
I asked my guide, a Jew from Morocco,
who had warned me "of the dangers
of taking Jerusalem too seriously":
They got their land. Why aren't they happy and grateful?

Our people are exhibitionists, he said
when I returned to his side near some steep steps
leading to a terrace that overlooked the wall.
They use the Wall
to make shows of being Jewish.

I persisted, Does being Jewish forbid jumping with joy
to have finally reached the wall?

Old habits are hard to break, he answered.
Melancholia is a hereditary trait.



7
Maybe some day
I will break an egg with a triple yolk,
sign of synthesis
and identity beholden to nothing
that can take form
or seek something missing
or hidden
from itself.

The hidden sees itself
revealed in everything it names
so it may be clearly known
and told to other.



8
Gone / foregone
in conclusion:
Cloud-covered moon
whose brightness blinded.
Seethe of surf
that now lulls and lingers.
Observant eye and fine-tuned ear
that invite union
of mind and matter
in everything seen
and sung.

Beholden to
cradle of perception
and fulcrum of creation.

The first people
are the last people
chosen for no other purpose
but to outgrow
the illusion
there are others
than one's deepest self
and soul.

--Ardmore, January 9-10, 2018

Paul Blackburn and the Art of Remembrance

My friend-since-college Ron Caplan recently published a book on a Cape Breton obituary poet, Andrew Dunphy, called "A Stone for Andrew Dunphy." It isn't until the last chapter that the reader realizes the "Stone" is the book itself--a gravestone made of deep scholarship and reverent study of this man who wrote elegies on request for cape residents. Ron's book has been in and on my mind since finishing it over a month ago. I wondered if the tradition of narrative rhyme about which he writes so eloquently had continuance of some sort in my/our time. Something in me knew it did but that it wasn't a literal kind that sought to preserve a tradition in neo-classical mimicry. I had to perform my own ancestry.com search based on complex, zigzagging reading. Not surprisingly, I found the bequeathal was far more lateral, oblique and transformed in order to endure long transport and possibly harsh transplant in urbanized American soil. That poem, I believe, is Paul Blackburn's "The Selection of Heaven," written in 1963 for the poet's grandparents--Hannah, 87, and John Henry, 88, Blackburn (who died March 23rd and April 16th, 1963)--and who otherwise would have gone, as Dunphy's subjects would have, unremarked and unsung.

Here is Section 16 written for John Henry, from this masterpiece of modern American poetry. Blackburn has become a constant companion, his writing acting as a seeing-eye dog for the streets and straits of my country. God bless him. Ron and I had beers with Paul when he came to read at Temple University around 1967. Remember, dear friend. 

My love to all and my prayer for lives worthy of commentary like this. 

16.  w o r d s    :     should have been spoken at graveside

There are no true voices anymore, John 
Henry, you knucklehead, you hard-
headed, stiff-backed, tough-minded old man, your 
                            mouth is clenched tight for good 
                            it is a solid line

from under your sharpened nose around your pointed chin, above
                                                                                           that
the strong, kind, (remembered), and finally closed eyes, 
the dead tissues under the skull that were your brain 
softened finally with your      88        years

into a forgetfulness your children could 
relate to, could pity, could and did 
expiate themselves upon, so
                           accept their own lives

for what they had become or grown to, 
John, you knucklehead, you bonehead, in 
the old photographs you are more often
                           scowling, when the others
are smiling bravely into the bright sun.

                                                         You quarreled
with everyone you loved and were proud
when your children fought you back with brain and spirit 
and were hurt, of course you were hurt
                        by it, and loved them     .       You 
had made them irrevocably yours you would have said God's

and that's not true, and your mouth is closed for good
upon the air of this world, your hands     not
                        folded in eternity as that 
                        cliche-ridden, pompous, minister 
friend of yours who did you final service might 
have said had he the gift of words, but 
clenched, holding your heaven to you;
swollen farmer's hands that had been kinder than your mind was 
clenched in eternity the rock of your mind
that could not crack and open but
still clenched dissolved under the rain of years

the head still,
straight white hair still handsome     .       4 
generations gathered round a coffin yesterday to pay 
what truly was respect and sometimes love,     the 
different qualities of flesh
                                  from ruined to what
                         renews itself each day, and grows, John, 
stood there and did you honor     .     Rocks

wear away under the rain    .     Flesh is tough 
          the spirit
resilient     .     tougher than flesh   .    They
said you looked natural 
and in their mouths it 
was comforting cliché    .     The words 
were truer than they knew, you still looked 
                        stiff-backed, hard-headed, 
                        but the spirit gone, that blur,
a peace

E A R T H    T O     E A R T H

GOD,
be here at this graveside .
Not in the cut flowers the undertakers' men heaped up 
but in the new forsythia, red maple
                           buds, magnolia, be 
                           in the spring earth 
will heap this grave, grow new grass over it, 
golden green of willow starting fresh    .     be 
                           in the spring earth with John, 
your faithful servant,
where he will lie
next to Hannah as he did in life, her 
                           eternal lover     .      Lock them 
                           forever into this hillside
facing the Acushnet gulls settle on, 
         wheel over crying, hear them in the 
distance .

         Smoke rises
from between my forefinger
and middlefinger    .     Wind on this 
Cold spring hillside sweeps it off 
barely visible in the sunlight

the ashes
fall upon new grass .

A S H E S     TO     A S H E S

      John,
forgive the carpet of phoney grass
                           too dark for the season
the undertakers spread beneath your
coffin for this moment   .    We have 
seen you to this hillside, let it be 
enough    .     Forgive
the Reverend Doctor his recitation
of    2     Edgar Guest poems yesterday,   I
figured I could stand it if you could   .   The rain
of dirt and pebbles will be real enough . 
                            fresh clods set in
                            after you have settled    .     Rain 
                                               fructifies,
                                               but will wear away . 
                                                      ROCK
The committing ceremony had the 
dignity of its own
                         words, yesterday,
despite the use of flowers with their snapped-off heads 
instead of fistfuls of earth    .     EARTH  .
When the diggers end the job, let
the first 3 shovelsful of spring earth
be my shovelsful, let it be enough   .

D U S T    TO    D U S T

                                consigning    .     I
have not willed the occasion for these words 
which cry themselves like hunting gulls 
my mouth flapping open     .      GOD, 
welcome your servant John Henry
into whatever Paradise he thought existed, 
offer him
the best accomodation that you have for such a 
                                         lover of the mind     .     God 
                                         knows he has earned it,
                                  twice over  .
Let there be soft
                                  wind
where he is, let him hear gulls cry 
above the
bridge,
                                  and be home.