The Horses: New & Selected Poems

Dealing the Faces

59 deAling The FAces The cards were an entertainment a joke private wink in the fires of New York “The Hasidic kids trade them like baseball cards, Rich. The rebbes! The superstars!” Sleek swarthy glow of Steve’s face black hair graying at the temples flesh sinking subtly on the bones Like my own When I look at him I see the wreck of the young athlete Steve my alter ego who could leap who could crack that softball his horse legs pounding the beach A quarter century cigarettes spare tire faint gray beneath the eyes He handed me the thick small deck “They believe in them, Rich! Hasidic masters Tzaddiks.” “Tzaddikim,” Randy corrected him “They’re so funny!” Her brown eyes beamed full lips grinning tongue tip pressed in glee between her gapped front teeth Now when Steve and I meet on my annual trips to see my parents it’s here in the bosom of his family his wife Randy his nine year old daughter Aliza “The whole line of Hasidic holy men! All the way back to Rambam—Maimonides!” Trace of a smirk almost a leer 60 Steve’s scorn for this religious meshugas these black bowler-hatted Jews long coats and side curls who lull themselves on holy men in the belly of chaos poverty and street babble crime pollution drugs At the same time it hooked him I felt his dark eyes sparking at me teased provoked by this freakish human intensity Aliza sat straight contained almost inward spritely small replica of her father her hair gathered sideways in a glossy flowery tail I took the cards and began to deal As if the soul rose to its dream out of exile pogrom earthly scrabble not to inwardness exactly because it was not in space or time Like some vast fireball but perfect and not burning Like our own idea of intense concentration before the Big Bang But not of course 61 like anything else at all Ein Sof Infinite Godhead Then Rabbi Luria tells us came Zimzum Because there was potential not actual conflict between good? and evil? God contracted vacated a part of Allself inhaled inwardly disappearing God accepted an exile so that space and time could be born Dealing the faces the cards crept in my mind quaint portraits photographs some retouched in a sepia unclear zone between red writing beneath each face a squiggly Hebrew script Unlike Steve furtively wishfully I believe in tzaddikim in the secret laws of human radiance And so the cards began to nest to glint and fill with the light of New York 62 these annual trips like strobes in a fleshly river I had met Steve that afternoon at our regular rendezvous Printing Trades High School where he teaches in downtown Manhattan Every afternoon at 2:30 the school bursts like dropped fruit like a bomb The kids explode out of there pent up young Blacks and Latinos streaming jabbering in twos and threes punching and hooting and laughing I saw Steve over the heads waving to me and we made our way to his brown Toyota parked on 49th Street out front got in and began warming it up cold bright December day waiting for Lydia “This might be her last term,” he rolled his eyes at me “Her leg didn’t set right. She needs another operation.” I knew Lydia had met her several years running as a rider in Steve’s Toyota a member of this harried camaraderie of warders really more than teachers in a vocational school Steve calls a “prison” bureaucratic zero whose goals he says are survival till pension keeping the kids in some kind of order marking senseless violent time 63 After a few minutes Lydia emerged blue coat and flowered hat a tiny monkeylike woman in her mid-sixties rouged powdered inching on her crutches down the service way behind the school Steve scurried to help her in She had gotten a Ph.D. in English from Duke had taught at Ohio State and somehow ended here at Printing Trades refusing to retire refusing her pension although she could have packed it in years ago I don’t remember what we said pulling out onto 10th Avenue dodging the taxis uptown It was always dead air with Lydia Steve and I beaming a silent ironic commentary Lydia a joke a windup toy refined good sport...