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