Professor, and: Upstairs the Eulogy, Downstairs the Rummage Sale, and: The First Time, and: The One Who Has Left You, and: Shadows, and: A Jewish Poet, and: The Purpose of This World

Professor

So we enter the library once morein search of the self,as though it were not a word made up in the university,where students in jeans and professors in jackets and scarveslong for eternal truthsand to be published,to be read by other professors as they slip offtheir coats and hang them on the backs of their office chairsand dip into the years of lonely researchand the otherness of bus rides home.

Professor, who is it that owns truth,where is the pool that reflects our grieving faces?Did you have to give the lectureon the imminent failure of marriage?

Once when we met in your officeand you turned to your shelf to draw down a book that had changed your life,while your back was toward me,I concentrated all my energy on whispering Hashem's name,all irony fadedand angels were swimming from your lamp.

Upstairs the Eulogy, Downstairs the Rummage Sale

The beloved Yiddish professorpassed away on the same dayas the synagogue's rummage sale,

and because they could not bearthe coffin up the many steps thatled to the sanctuary,they left it in the hallway downstairs,

and because I was not one of his students,and it didn't matter if I heard the eulogy,they told me to stay downstairs,to watch over the body and recite psalms.

And I thought:this is how it is in life and death of a righteous man:upstairs, in the sanctuary, they speak of youin glowing terms,while down below your body rests besideold kitchen appliances.

And I recited the psalms as intently asI could over a man I had only met once,and because I knew where he was headed,and you and I were to wed in a few months,I asked that he bring with him a prayer for a good marriage.

And this is how it is in the life and death of a righteous man:strangers pray over the sum of your days,and strangers ask you to haul their heavy requestswhere you cannot even take your body.

The First Time

Sometimes, in the middle of a journeythe radio will break,and the traveler will be left without musicfor the rest of his wandering.He will drive from city to city with the last song he heard.

Sometimes, in the middle of love,the two parties stop speakingand it goes on this way for years.Though they no longer touch,each one falls asleep to the memoryof the last time they made love.

Then one day the radio returnsin the middle of the same song,like a man waking to finish the sentencehe began before his coma.

And the lovers, too, take up each others' bodies once again,but now they are oldand the lovemaking is slow and awkward,like the first time.

The One Who Has Left You

When I was a studentlove treated me like a roadJewish girls would travel downeach her own distance

until summer came and she would go to campand by the lake give her heartto one of the older boys,who worked in the kitchenand smoked behind the sports shackon the Sabbath,

And I learned never to make predictionsabout a love you are a part ofbecause you will find yourselfsitting alone in a movie house,watching the film you planned to see together.

And the man on the screenwill have dark hair and a distant facebut the woman will have the eyesof the one who has left you.

Shadows

For my wife

You do not remember the first time we met.It was a crowded night in Jerusalem,at the bottom of Ben Yehuda Street.

I said to myself,"Who is...