That Said (9 page)

Each night when I tried to sleep,

I heard the alarm clock's jeweled

movement, seventeen diamond planets

on sawtooth wheels orbiting a ruby sun.

But something else was ticking

in another part of the Milky Way.

A cloud-spasm in the utter darkness,

something else was swimming into the galaxy.

Who could imagine anything as silly

as a child the size of a thumb,

a replica, a shrunken opposite,

a speck of sand that no amount

of wishing could dislodge.

Inside my mother's body, a baby

as big as a lima bean

was growing. But the child I carried

with me, who slept the sleep

of a speechless animal,

I carried for my own protection.

I never raised a hand against my mother

because the hand can crush what it protects.

It was hot. A size too large,

my wool winter suit scratched.

Indian summer flaring up through fall.

The shul's broken window bled sunlight

on the congregation; the Red Sea

of carpet parted the women from the men.

Mother next to daughter, father next to son,

flipped through prayer books in unison

trying to keep the place. Across the aisle,

my father wore a borrowed prayer shawl.

A black yarmulke covered his bald spot.

 

The rabbi unlocked the ark

and slid the curtain open. Propped inside,

two scrolls of the Torah dressed like matching dolls,

each a king and a queen. Ribbons hung down

from their alabaster satin jackets;

each one wore two silver crowns.

I wondered, could the ancient kings

have been so small? So small,

and still have vanquished our enemies?

 

The cantor's voice rose

like smoke over a sacrificial altar,

and lambs, we rose to echo the refrain.

Each time we sat down

my mother rearranged her skirt.

Each time we stood up

my head hurt from the heat, dizzy

from tripping over the alphabet's

black spikes and lyres,

stick-figure battalions marching to defend

the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

 

Rocking on their heels, boats

anchored in the harbor of devotion,

the temple elders davened Kaddish, mourning the dead.

Our neighbor who owned the laundry down the street

covered his left wrist out of habit—

numbers indelible as those

he inked on my father's shirt collars.

Once, I saw that whole arm disappear

into a tub of soapy shirts,

rainbowed, buoyant as the pastel clouds

 

in
The Illustrated Children's Bible,

where God's enormous hand reached down

and stopped a heathen army in its tracks.

But on the white-hot desert of the page

I was reading, it was noon,

the marching letters swam, the regiments

wavered in the heat,

a red rain falling on their ranks.

I watched it fall one drop at a time.

I felt faint. And breathed out sharply,

my nose spattering blood across the page.

 

I watched it fall, and thought,

You are a Chosen One,

the child to lead your tribe.

I looked around the swaying room.

Why would God choose me

to lead this congregation of mostly strangers,

defend them against the broken windows,

the spray-painted writing on the walls?

 

Overhead, the everlasting light, a red bulb,

was burning. As if God held me in His fist,

I stumbled down the synagogue stairs

just in time to hear

a cyclone of breath twist through

the shofar, a battle cry so powerful

it blasted city walls to rubble.

I reeled home through the dazed traffic

of the business day—

past shoppers, past my school,

in session as usual,

spat like Jonah from the whale

back into the Jew-hating world.

One at a time from the pile

each player in turn tries

 

to remove the jackstraws—

the miniature hoes, shovels,

 

ladders, pickaxes, rakes—

without moving any of the others.

 

Light as a bird bone,

the fragile sword fallen free

 

from your lucky scatter

is easily yours.

 

You may keep it and attempt

another. Using the tiny hook

 

or your fingers, you barely

touch a wrench when the hammer

 

below it stirs.

On your next turn, careful

 

as a paleontologist,

bones craning over bones,

 

you lift a pitchfork

cantilevered on a scythe

 

balanced on the flat blade

of an oar which rests

 

against the nervous edge

of the saw—one body

 

touching the body of another

which has touched another's

 

body, and so on, that graveyard

of relations better left buried

 

and forgotten like the casual love

you fall out of and out of.

 

The more chances you are given,

the more the diminishing returns.

 

If you had the hammer

you could fix the stairs

 

that lead to the basement

that shelters the rat

 

that shows you his nest

where the nails are hidden.

 

Though your heap of jackstraws

keeps growing, the player

 

with the most points wins.

Why is an arrow

 

worth less than a saw,

and a saw worth more than a hammer?

 

It's a foolish carpenter

who doesn't know the value

 

of his tools.

The pile dwindles to two.

 

You'll play until love

either kills or heals you—

 

like the young husband

who, at daybreak, extracts himself

 

from his sleeping bride,

careful not to wake her,

 

lifting his trembling body,

pale and weightless as straw.

As you slept, your pulse

flickering on your neck like a trick of light,

I thought how, earlier, beside the sleeping shape

Adam labored the whole night to stay awake,

afraid she'd vanish in the morning with the moon.

Out from the earth sprang the planet's

blurred, unpredictable life.

The pulse of the near hill—

or was it the shudder he was born with?—

rocked him. The animals, also,

that yesterday brushed like wind against his body,

were now given form. On a branch,

an icicle began to melt.

It hung, glistening and patient,

while a zipper of vertebrae inched all the way down

its back. Then bands of bargello

stitched the skin—tiny sawtooth flames

of dull gold and rust, rust and gold.

This he named
snake
.

On the topmost branch of the tree,

a bird bristled with little white thorns.

Then each thorn fanned out like a palm frond

and the bird flew away.

All day, Adam watched and listened,

but he couldn't name his loneliness—

the long “oh” of sorrow, the “ooh” of hallelujah.

Eleven curved knife blades

of his rib cage, and the twelfth

that cut his flesh without injury,

he accepted, as he accepts

these other gifts placed before him.

 

All night, he memorized her human shape,

so that later, were she not there,

his memory could reconstruct that absent body

from the air, and wrench him from his solitude

before the tender acre cradled her.

At eight o'clock we woke to the chain saw.

Stands of pines quivered

as the empty flatbed lumbered by

printing snakeskins on the snowy road.

The telephone company was thinning out the woods.

 

That afternoon, we snowshoed to a neighbor's farm.

They were gone, but their brown cow leisurely chewed

the rags of grass beneath the snow.

The sound her teeth made tearing

was like a seamstress ripping out a seam.

The enormous head swayed and dipped—

it scared us too. A skein of spittle

dangled from her lower jaw;

her tongue was big as a boot, awkward and dull pink;

her black leather nostrils snorted

a storm of cumuli, hot and white.

 

It got colder. Dusk held the trees in amber—

the ones, that is, left standing.

Around the fresh-cut stumps, sawdust, a fringe of twigs

were mashed into the snow.