Читать книгу Frayed Light - Yonatan Berg - Страница 9

LETTER TO THE READER

In conversations I cannot explain myself—still

an erupting mass of arrogant youth: fruits of conflict

with the body, an overflow of zeal trapped

inside, a decisive lack of seriousness,

traits acquired when I left

the grim corridor, too brightly lit with mitzvoth.

The constant urge to touch, I know,

means always to be thirsty.

I’m embarrassed by nudity, weeping, moments

of pure stupidity, gatherings with a family

that only asks to be left alone.

I try, time after time

to talk to the boy I could have been—

the engaged one, the generous, self-controlled one who pauses

before opening doors, allowing the dogs to run wild into the future.

They bark, my faithful friends of heresy,

of despair and self-denial, forever running inside me

with crude enthusiasm. Now, so it seems,

it’s too late to change, too late

for caution. How I love the sound of glass

hitting the floor of the room, yes, you know it—

pushing through the midnight gate and beyond

to the flat surface, the silvery one,

the tired pipe organ of creation.

I apologize to each and every one of you

that I cannot touch, cannot reach out

to ease your pain, cannot hold you to me,

knowing I will ruin it all by saying something about the self—

something too flowery, too sophisticated. That being the case,

this letter becomes one blurry trail

of what, at day’s end,

I really wanted to whisper in your ear.

UNITY

We travel the silk road of evening,

tobacco and desire flickering

between our hands. We are warm travelers,

our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

We break bread under the pistachio tree,

under the Banyan tree, under the dark

of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up

in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel

in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices

announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops

heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,

with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,

traveling with ardour in our loins, with the cry of birth.

We sit crossed-legged within the rocking

of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells

of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel

through eagles of death, dilution of earth in rivers,

in eulogies, through marble, we travel through the silk

of evening, our hearts like bonfires in the dark.

PARTICULAR TIMING

Now my needy self, the wasted one, appears.

Now to be the one who crosses the dirt track

on his way to the ends of the evening, a boy

escaping home, close to silence.

Now to remember the young man entering

the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,

the smell of incense, the oil, flickering walls,

the great theological ennui,

the stones of the tomb blanching in damp darkness,

the great theological ennui and prayer,

now recalling prayer when pebbles of time multiply in pockets,

the stopping at night, the aching body,