Texts

"What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept?" -- Alanis Morisette, "Hands Clean"

"…look what you've done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me." – Lolita


He was a small German Jew

With coffee stained teeth

I always thought

There was something

Not quite above board

About him, but I

Adored him anyway.

He taught me Aristotle

In a seminar room –

The Hassids would have

Asked, a dark room and

The two of you alone,

Are you married? But we

Had texts. We had theory,

And a sign language for

Jewish ritual objects. I

Invented one, accidentally,

And he picked it up, so we

Used another language

Between us. His gift was

Storytelling. I’ll never know

If half the things he told me

About himself were true

In the usual sense, but the

Stories were for real. If I wrote

A poem for each one,

They would overflow

A volume. And never

Never lose their charm.

We were charming, light

And witty. We were

Symbiotic. He enjoyed name-

Dropping, and I let him, I

Let him change my name

To suit his lilting cadences.

I Played Ophelia

“I lov'd you not….Get thee to a nunn'ry, why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners?” – Hamlet, III, i,127-131

“In making Hamlet more “manly” than any man had ever done, [Sarah] Bernhardt doubly crossed the canonical text, from which she was already doubly distanced as a French-speaker and a Jew.”
– Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing The Canon
 

I played Ophelia

To her Hamlet.

She stung me

With her words.

She was suitably

Cruel. She mocked

My ideas,

She mocked

My dowry.

I tried to save her

From herself

To no avail.

She effaced me with her

Soliloquies.

I wanted to love her

But it was madness.

I lost myself

I found religion.

Hamlet, your kingdom

Rots from within

(but there’s no

Sense in talking to her)

I am learning to live

Through the chaos,

To be the one

Who survives.

Gaze Theory


So a glinting

Tin can

Sloughing off

The sun turns

Its gaze from

The sea to

Jacques Lacan.

And he dubs it

Petit object A

In light of its

Inanimate gaze.

But now we form

Our objects

To think

For themselves.

So a code with

Indeterminate

Address can

Watch with

One eye

And log our

Every step

Or key typed –

This is petit object B,

Watching from an

Ocean born at Cern,

We’ve taught ephemera

To gaze on us.

Suddenly, a Litvak

 
As though the dead

Could speak, their names

Jumped up at me

From the Yizkor Book

Of Lida, Byelorus.

My grandmother always

Said we were part

White– Russian –  

She didn’t say

We were part Jewish –

But her mother’s maiden

Name, attached to all these

People from a shtetl

That disappeared confirmed

What I already sensed.

Then the book of Russian

Jewish names tied our roots

To the once shtetl

Of Levidany, just beyond

Vilna, Lithuania. And I

Became, suddenly, a Litvak.