Homage to Charles Aznavour, and: The Rabbi Writes a Marriage Poem

Homage to Charles Aznavour

"I am at home in my own skin, very much at home even, I am my own best friend. I always say, 'It's too bad a man like me has to die.'"

A man who loves his life may wonder why
the breath that lives and loves can end in death.
Too bad, he thinks, a man like me must die.

La joie d'amour, the passionate come-cry
will all be stilled and silenced, like the breath,
and leave the joyful man to wonder why

his passionate regard failed to defy
the fickle spirit that provides, and yet
assures that even those who love must die.

The spirit craves eternity, an endless sky
in which the wings of Orpheus have breadth
to soar above the others wondering why

the joys of weightlessness are not come by
through trickery, deceit, or mere regret,
but merely by the ones who will not die.

And yet such men, as well, must still comply
with laws eternal, never yielding, set.
Too bad, they think, a man like me must die,
who loved his life, and now must wonder why.

The Rabbi Writes a Marriage Poem

Because he is more devoted to the moral than the true,
the rabbi's poem turns constantly away
from its author's ambivalence, it turns constantly

toward a kind of stubborn devotion to his wife,
his children, the institution of marriage itself,
like a road headed steeply downhill that must pause

every few miles for a scenic outlook of some sort,
a consoling view that will allow the driver to go on,
to keep heading downhill, but not too fast, never

out of control, and so, whenever the word desire
rears its ugly head, it must be followed shortly
thereupon by duty, and, of course, love,

because the rabbi, after all, is in the love
and duty business, the rabbi is a pillar
of the community, and pillars must be solid,

steadfast, unswerving in their devotion to what is
righteous, even at the price of a certain infidelity
to the poem, whose business, after all, is to careen

wholeheartedly toward the truth – narrow, dark,
and deep – of what we feel indeed, but the rabbi
feels duty-bound to all that can be recited

from a podium, with conviction, to the assembled
faithful, the rabbi is heavy with the weight
of examples he must set for the more dangerously

poetic, so he takes out his eraser and, whenever
he comes upon the word lust, substitutes love,
whenever there is a moment of doubt, he substitutes

faith, he wants to keep this poem of his from heading
downhill too fast, he knows a man can be wholeheartedly
devoted to only one thing, he has entered into this

workshop only on a whim, a kind of poetic aside
to his actual life, and so he applies the brakes,
he calls the poem to a halt at a dangerous turn,

an ungodly truth, a painful desire, as rabbis must.