Thirty years ago, the American
poet Shirley Kaufman and her husband moved from San Francisco to
a desert watered by more than five thousand years of wars that
even today explode bodies as if they were wineskins burst by anything
fast enough to pierce the superficial and seek out an innocent
life. Shortly after they arrived in Israel, the Yom Kippur War
broke out, quickly introducing them to "air raid shelters,
deaths of young people whose families we knew, and the immediacy
of fear…" (Interview with Lisa Katz. http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/kaufmanview.html)
Columns that breach political
quicksand may lead to humane foundations to which these days of
folly fear to reach. Here, too, we get sense of liminality, by
focusing on a single threshold, a single-page poem titled "Our
neighbor in charge of the." This page, as with all this book’s
pages, has a yellowish tinge, the cast of living wood from which
is was sliced still evident, as in a later poem Kaufman sees "uprooted
/ cedars like overreaching / toward / their Babel hubris / fir
trunks / like ancient columns / thrown down…" ("The
sign on a new bridge.")
Even at the beginning we cannot
hide. There is no shelter; yet, we begin with the vision of a bomb
shelter. I have seen pictures of such places dug beneath Israeli
sand, where mothers lock their arms around children and stare at
the ceiling, as Ancient Hebrews searched at the sky, wondering
whether their vengeful god would suddenly strike them down for
their alleged sins. The Jews are a people rooted in the sky, which
gives this poem’s beginning, "Our neighbor in charge
of the / shelter," an ironic twist from a Sky God, who allows
deadly missiles the arc through his domain, to seeking refuge in
the Earth Goddess’s merciful womb. Under fire, Heaven and
Earth, the divine couple whom Mircea Eliade calls "the leitmotiven of
universal mythology," hide under the Lady’s bed.
"…he’ll clean
it," the poem continues, "sometime / before the next
war…" Wars are not only inevitable, they are always already "dirty," so
we need to make a place free of pollution from the contingent wars
our leaders continuously plan in their fantasy of bombproof bunkers
spread beneath the earth. Then, "we leave the door open /
so he won’t forget." All shelters have a door; and in
light of the earth-penetrating missiles now being designed and
built, the shelter’s door is always open. "The rape of
the earth" has become a literal truth.
So we will dig deeper, as the
narration suddenly shifts from the third to the second person,
a step more personal, a step closer to oneself. The neighbor is
addressed, but is he? Who would talk to a person like this?: "each
morning your sloping shoulders" carry the heavy burden the
soul places on them. It is as if the words are sliding off his
shoulders like rare raindrops. This is a poet speaking, after all,
not someone dribbling mundane words off her tongue. The great Jewish
poet, Edmond Jabès, wrote, "O how the bidden threshold slides
into the threshold forbidden," Thus, each of Kaufman’s
words looks beyond itself, testing the integrity of what is forbidden.
She continues, pointing out "your
resourceful hands your /fingers…" In his book, The
Human Hand in Primitive Art, (Austin, TX., 1925), V.J. Smith
wrote: "It is reported that the walls of every native-built
house in Jerusalem are decorated by prints of the hand, in order
to avert the evil eye," and that "There is a record,
from Tunis, of a Jewish practice of placing the imprint of a bleeding
hand upon the walls of each floor of a building." The talent
of the Jewish hand goes further than mere building, digging, or
cleaning; it participates in ancient rituals of warding off evil;
e.g., the "terrorist," by imprinting, an act that stems
back to Paleolithic cave painting, where through millennia the
ghosts of hands clung to lightless hidden walls.
The man’s fingers are then
compared to "ten flavors / of yogurt / labeled in Hebrew".
Why has yogurt entered this poem? As the poet doesn’t give
us a clue, reverie must step in.. What I see—please bear with
me—is Siddhartha sitting beneath a tree. The future Buddha
has realized that all his yogic privations have only led to weakness,
not to the promised realization. So he begins to eat again, and
we know the menu of his first real meal in years: yogurt. Only
after he has been nourished by the curds is he able to sit with
his back straight, fingers touching, completing a somatic connection,
and concentrate long enough to reach the state of consciousness
that would change the spiritual world forever. From yoga to yogurt,
from traditional austerities to faith in a concert between well-being
and being enlightened.
Kaufman’s yogurt, one flavor
for each finger, is labeled in the sacred language the transplanted
poet had to learn in middle age, like a tree that sends out rhizomes
to find a new source of water. And here it ends. Not the poem,
but the thought.
In her interview with Lisa Katz,
Kaufman says "There are always threads, and there is always ‘the
way,’ when you find it. But nothing gets tied together –or
resolved." So the poet is pointing somewhere else. Maybe the
man’s ten fingers are an oblique reference to the Hebraic
Ten Commandments, in which "Thou shalt not kill" is read "Thou
shalt not make war on thy neighbor"? Roots are complex, and "if
your knees were your hands / they would forget their thick-rooted
pain…" Palms would meet the ground, bowing an act of
levitation. But the human brain has an easier time remembering
than forgetting; even more so, forgiving. It’s root is the
brain-stem, that knee-jerk inceptor that wanders into the limbic
system, tapping the amygdala’s reactive instinctive drives.
So, "forget the headlines," Kaufman begs, "reckless
words / I shove / under the table…"
To Katz, the poet lamented: "There
was a saving moment of euphoria after the Oslo accords while we
planned for two secure states living peacefully side by side. But
now our hopes have collapsed, and we are all responsible." Have
we come to a point where negotiations are off the table, and it
is mainly reckless words that we will hear from now on? Reckless
words, the bankrupt currency of the present American Administration,
and the bombs and bullets they unleash, words Kaufman would "rub
out / with my bare feet."
With bare feet one rubs out lines
drawn in the sand: fences don’t make good neighbors. Bare
feet are also a sacred gesture, the divine being as uncomfortable
as a shoe that is an infinite number of sizes too large. So it
all comes down to the notion of a "Holy Land," the concept
of a god who is historically tied to a particular place, whose
broken voice is knotted into books, and, like the spirit road in
a Navajo rug, whose poets work to leave a door open.
© Joel Weishaus 2004