| A man erupted into my cafe
Posted: 12/19/2007 3:32:41 PM | A man erupted
into my café,
his girth extended
in more directions
than I had directions.
I had a cup of espresso.
He had a bowl.
I had a croissant.
He had two.
His head was about the size
of one of my grand-children.
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| A man erupted into my cafe
Posted: 12/19/2007 5:17:52 PM | But Jer....what did you really want to say.........
Oh, thank you for the laugh, and it was a belly laugh..... | |
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| Doppelgängers
Posted: 12/20/2007 3:34:28 AM |
There’s a guy gets right up my nose,
because I practically invite him there,
which does neither him nor me
nor the planet any good, but then,
like any deep love or hate-affair
(and is there any difference, sometimes,
between them?) it isn’t really
meant to do anyone any good,
least of all the two obsessively involved in it.
In the Soviet Union once,
driving somewhere with Konchalevski-Mikhalkov,
we got to discussing contemporary film directors.
I didn’t much like Godard, I confessed.
“Me too!” Andrei exclaimed excitedly.
“I khate him! But I must have enemies
in order to live!” | |
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| Meditation
Posted: 12/22/2007 7:26:11 AM |
The earth is a beach in space
we cross at an angle to the sea.
There is no walking parallel
with it. Or with ourselves. Spiral
to the root, we travel
crooked at the source. Without
and within, these eyes, this beach,
this skin--the elements puddle
and, for all we know, hold firm.
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| Happy the Season
Posted: 12/23/2007 2:09:03 AM | with a Jer in it!
Thank you for a year's worth of good heart! And a wonderful coming year!
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| Happy the Season
Posted: 12/23/2007 2:46:50 AM | Ah, but the New Year began
yesterday or it will
as soon as my heart is ready.
The sun is a bossy time-keeper
but a wayward one!
It thinks 24 hours: one day and
24 hours: another day
but overlooks those that are 23 ½
or 49 hours long or how
a certain glance can split a nano-second
36 ways to Sunday and cram it
full of a whole week’s joy! | |
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| A woman sits down for breakfast
Posted: 12/25/2007 4:53:39 AM | A woman sits down for breakfast,
the first of thousands with her new husband:
one-half of a grapefruit, lightly-buttered
brown toast, a soft-boiled egg, coffee.
The space-time continuum moves through
and around them. She isn’t thinking
exactly, not wholly formed sentences
unless “love” is a sentence or “wonderment”
or a whisper of “anxiety.”
A bird lands on a branch of the tree
in their backyard,
unseen by either of them. | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 12/31/2007 5:05:57 AM | Black-coated figures
on a field of white,
Sabbath khassidim
trudge their way
from Belz and Sarajevo
and Bergen-Belsen across
snow-capped Montreal streets
towards their makeshift synagogues
where I would neither be welcome
nor would I want to go.
Garish and Godless
in my browns and greens,
plaid, Polo, Geoffrey Beane,
I’d stand out amongst them
like a gaudy wound
on pale, tender flesh.
They carried their wounded,
useless God in pekelach1,
in cardboard and vinyl suitcases,
He who had stood patiently
among them in the line-up
for the Brause Bad2,
had inhaled the Zyklon-B
that poured from the shower-heads,
clawed with them for air,
died, and was incinerated,
black ash ascending
into white European clouds.
Here how visible they are
in their shtreimelach3
and their stark black coats
against the newly virgin snow.
1=little packages
2=shower-baths, as they were identified to those who had been consigned to be gassed
3=the round, fur-trimmed hats worn by the orthodox Hassidic men. | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 12/31/2007 11:55:52 AM | My dear, dear Alyosha. You're feeling the tugs of your ancestral past and putting into words so that some of us not only attempt to understand, but to feel it as well.
Frighteningly stark images I saw, and felt. | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 12/31/2007 1:24:40 PM | | Thank you, love. There is something about these fundamentalists that evokes complicated feelings in me, not always sympathetic ones! | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 12/31/2007 8:27:47 PM | why is it so hard to get happy
and so easy to feel sad | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 1/1/2008 1:23:14 AM | Alyosha ... have the same ties
l'chai-im | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 1/1/2008 3:46:54 AM | Wintersolstce: difficult question! If you come up with an answer, let us all know please!
Sunoir: Toda raba. Shalom u'vracha. (Thank you very much. Peace and a blessing) | |
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| Two short, not particularly happy poems
Posted: 1/6/2008 2:37:07 PM | 1
There's trouble brewing in my neighbour's eye:
loneliness, like a shock,
prickling the back of his neck,
and he, no more than I, has the answer.
'These are troubled times,'
we exclaim without speaking,
now his curtains drawn,
now mine.
2
Madness is stalking our buttons,
eager to snaffle them up,
cheap or dear. Even the zippers
have gone to join an international cartel.
What Marx left out of the equation
was spite, and despair. There are some
who would rather crack heads
than watch their profits rise. | |
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| Two short, not particularly happy poems
Posted: 1/6/2008 2:41:46 PM | ^^^^ WOW!!!^^^^
It MUST be an election year, when powers sway and history reminds us that we should be ever vigilant. Very powerful Jer. Loved 'em both. | |
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| Wild Child
Posted: 1/6/2008 4:19:34 PM | Wild Child
Wild child
always running
never stopping
just to see
what may be
right in front
for her to see
Wild child
ready to roam
finding no place
to call her own
a place to share
her burdens and care
for time is short
and she is the
Wild child
wishing to stop
to smell the flowers
she's been missing
each minute, every hour
hoping for a hand
to guide her through
'til she's home
and holding you
v
oncelucid
lucidmoment
8 June 2007
Wasn't sure if I'd ever shared this one with you and wanted you to see. If I have, my apology for redundancy.
V | |
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| Wild Child
Posted: 1/6/2008 4:30:17 PM | In the wing I know
Even the elevator keeps Sabbath
Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday
Is automatic: goes to top
stops at each floor
on the way down
And this wing
wouldn't even exist
without those quiet
men in black
with a curl
I don't forget to bless them
as I pass them, quietly chatting,
and thank them for your life
. | |
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| Wild Child
Posted: 1/7/2008 4:49:02 AM | | Re "Wild Child" - no, I don't think you had shared this with us but if you had it would nevertheless have been well worth repeating. What a marvellously unpushy touch you have, my friend! | |
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| Wild Child
Posted: 1/7/2008 4:55:28 AM |
In the wing I know
Even the elevator keeps Sabbath
Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday
Is automatic: goes to top
stops at each floor
on the way down
And this wing
wouldn't even exist
without those quiet
men in black
with a curl
I don't forget to bless them
as I pass them, quietly chatting,
and thank them for your life
That last line puzzles me: for whose life?
But either I never knew about the Sabbath elevator or I'd forgotten about it. Isn't it a hoot? It has started me imagining God waiting for it to arrive at 'His' floor, silently giving thanks to the khassidim for sparing Him the need to summon it.
Alternately, imagine if that elevator possessed a limited amount of consciousness and wondered sadly why it kept stopping when no had called for it. | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 1/7/2008 8:43:40 AM | this poem is one of those gems we talk about
I love this in particular:
snow-capped Montreal streets
towards their makeshift synagogues
where I would neither be welcome
nor would I want to go.
and honestly the work it takes to understand is sometimes worth more than the poem initially.... | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 1/7/2008 9:37:32 AM |
I love this in particular:
snow-capped Montreal streets
towards their makeshift synagogues
where I would neither be welcome
nor would I want to go.
Thanks to your picking up on this I realize there's an element of ambivalence in it, of the lady doth protest too much, because much as I shrink from these fundamentalists and resent them for representing what many people will take as the true face of the Jews, I guess I secretly envy them their close-knit community, their conviction in their beliefs...
and honestly the work it takes to understand is sometimes worth more than the poem initially....
Not sure I understand this. Care to elaborate, bro, either here or via PM? | |
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| Black on white
Posted: 1/7/2008 6:38:27 PM | hook
nothing seems right
about this goodbye
I could search the globe
and never find your like
something inside you
addictive candy
looking fine
and dandy
hand on the door
I cannot help
but feel your hook
take note
of the pain
in my backward look
LS 01/06/08
Daily Poet | |
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| Wild Child
Posted: 1/8/2008 5:49:50 PM | | Jer ~~ Edwin. Tisch Hospital, NYC ~~ who was there so often, emergency and otherwise. | |
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| The Ascent of Everest
Posted: 1/11/2008 12:17:26 PM | No one had climbed Mt Everest
until Tenzing Sherpa and Hillary did it.
Now, it’s a stroll in the park!
My Aunt Edith, the other day,
on her way to Bloomingdale’s,
took the long way around
and with her recyclable shopping bag,
her knitting, the book she was reading
for her book club, she climbed it
without breaking a sweat. | |
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| My love is my love
Posted: 1/18/2008 3:37:49 AM | My love is my love.
Everything else about her
––the open-eyed way she took me in
when we made love, the warmth
of her small, small breasts,
her frequent gasps of laughter
–– is embroidery. But embroidery
is sometimes inseparable from the cloth
it adorns. There are a thousand
thousand other things
I cherish about her, that
are her: her deliciously
not quite perfect English, the way her tears
are never very far away, her love
for food that cannot possibly nourish her, but
my love is my love. | |
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