Threnody, and: Letter to an Old Poet, and: Parable, and: Erato’s Instruction

Threnody

The dream is recurrent, and yes the dream can leave me weeping, waking with a start, confused, and pressing my wet face hard into the pillow. That is to say the dream is very bitter.

The scenes are various, the gist unchanging: my father returns, and we all are at once elated that his death was apparently an error, that he had simply been away, a visit to the shore.

Then, increasingly, I grow uneasy about how deeply he has changed. He is both frail and distracted (or it could be that he withholds some matter capturing his mind), and none of us

dares speak, neither of his death nor of his sudden, startling return. We share other confusions as well: He has arrived in the camper truck he drove when I was a boy, but my wife and children are also here to greet him,

even my son, whom he has never met. Often, in the dream, I am the one who first suspects he cannot stay. I am the one who sees but cannot say his visit will be brief. And just as I suspected, as I feared, I wake.

Letter to an Old Poet

Sir, I trust you are feeling better, now that mundane gravity has been —for you and those you entertain— eclipsed by more compelling gravitas. Does it register as similarly burdensome? I wonder also what you make these days of angelic life on the whole, and in particular, of your nearness to those bodiless beings you were wont to approach duly with both love and fear. And of Himself? Now that the abysmal, angelic enormity has been revealed to have been all along hardly more than a murmur of His own and endless, deep bass note, I wonder how you manage.

I too have felt the occasional tremor of those wings, and worry how, when all is made more manifest, I may suffer their proximity, and the press of the One whose messages they bear.

Parable

To what might this slow puzzle be compared? The rabbi is perplexed. That said, please bear in mind the rabbi has a taste for fraught perplexities. Comparisons have long obtained for those enamored of the word a measure of requital, have tendered—just here, for instance—a momentary take, a likely likening, not to be unduly honored as anything, well, conclusive, but categorically toward. Still, I love these textures on the tongue, and love the way their taste and feel so often serve to spin the body and the mind into one vertiginous assemblage. And so, one asks, to what slight figure might The Vast and Inexplicable compare? A mist that penetrates the bone? The looming sea? The all but endless and unyielding green expanse above? Or, say, the laden word whose compass and whose burdens turn a multitude of keen articulations, all of which do not quite satisfy.

Erato’s Instruction

I like that you worry every word, she said. It reminds me of myself. She took my hand and brushed it with her lips. And I am

specially pleased to know you test each tenderphoneme with your tongue—and so thoroughly. She brought her lips to mine, still whispering,

and most of all, I find your willingnessto learn . . . well, irresistible, so much soit surprises even me. Her sudden breath

met mine in what was then a lively coupling, a likely give and take. And see, she breathed, as two are brought together they educe

a novel third—as we addressed the matter of the moment to accommodate a due confusion of invention and intent.

Discovery, she breathed into my ear, depends on just such willingness, a faithin what may come of one’s surrendering

the meager expectations, and a hopethat what another brings to the affairis worth the trouble.