Failure/Transgression/Trying To Get It Right
a folio of poems for the High Holidays
Editor’s Note: The ancient season of atonement is upon us. We fail, fall down, and — sometimes foolishly — scramble right back up again. Yet, who’s to say we always know what’s gone wrong — or even who’s to blame? Reciting an Al Chet doesn’t necessarily clarify things, especially now, when life requires of us ever-expanding ways to, as contributor Josette Akresh-Gonzales achingly puts it in her poem “Cider Vinegar Bourbon Punch,” “simply get through the day.”
Amid the confusion and tumult, older rites and forms of expiation can feel outdated. And yet, as some of these gorgeous poems may spur us to wonder: can fresher ones possess the same lasting power? In Jared Harel’s “Plastic Butterflies,” for instance, his speaker shares that his private contemporary ritual — donating blood — no longer feels as meaningful as it once did, while in Marea Gordett’s “Vanished,” her speaker tries, in vain, to navigate mortal dread by listing extinct birds: a novel litany of loss.
If some of this folio’s contributors take a modernized look at faith, others find eloquence in its traditions. Richard Michelson, Jacqueline Osherow, Catherine Gonick, David Ebenbach and Judith Chalmer all explore established practices of the season, including the symbolic casting away of sins (tashlich); the reciting of piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems); and the participating in a prayerful choreography.
Whether you’re secular or religious, or simply love good poetry, we hope that you’ll find much to enjoy in this folio of poems pegged to the Jewish High Holidays. May you enjoy a shanah tovah — a sweet new year.
— Susan Comninos, Poetry Editor
MEDITATION AFTER CASTING MY SINS UPON THE WATERS As if God had kicked the crutch of belief out from under the limbs of the wounded. As if our souls were unwanted weekend guests in the summer beach house of the body. As if I were still the magician’s squeaky-voiced assistant, waving my scrawny wand. I Will Create As I Speak The Lord once stated, in Aramaic no less: Avra Kahdabra — distracting us with cape and hat and that sly, cunning grin. O how I envied His deep voice and gift for misdirection. And now my astonishment at this morning’s small miracle when, up early and stumbling at the shore, I saw, as I fell face down into the shallows, my sins swimming about me like a school of minnows. No, I mean like my own fingers, all ten of them, intertwining in a gesture of prayer. — Richard Michelson
APPLE CIDER BOURBON PUNCH “I’m confident this is what God drinks on a cold winter night” — NYTimes Cooking God doesn’t drink, God lifts God’s empty glass to God’s lips, God’s cup is a volcano, God’s lips are ozone holes. I run away, heart pounding, from a handsome woman at the poetry fair, her sea-gray eyes fizzing, flirting. I pivot on the ball of my foot, turn my back on a sunset, rose quartz, cool air tingling the goose bumps on my forearms, away from the exquisite touch. God’s empty head, strawberry ice cream, God’s absent orifice licks, chews, and swallows nothing, doesn’t need a drink at the end of the long workday. God’s lust is an earthquake, God’s work is rain. I am literally crying, why can’t I simply get through the day. — Josette Akresh-Gonzales
CONFESSION with the tongues of three faiths I woke this morning feeling posthumous, as if I’d died in the night without knowing. When shamans said, Make death your ally and live as if you’ve already died, I didn’t. Nor did I practice dying, as Buddhist teachers advised—feel myself fading, falling away, in knowable, chartable stages, see myself dead in a coffin. Unless I’m inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, it might be too late to live each day as though it were my last, except for this one. If I’m already dead, I can only give thanks, and marvel at life, how much mine contained yet stayed empty, how much I studied but failed to learn. How I hungered to know the world, but only skimmed the surface like a water-strider on a pond. Not to mention so much time spent in pits, or else perched on a pillar, like that Desert Father who wrestled with demons fifty feet in the air, had a small fence built at the base to keep back crowds, while his followers sent up food in a basket, accepted his chamber pot in return. Now is the day to walk out of my crumbled fortress of self, still packed with thoughts and feelings, cosmic dust, and my failures in friendship and love, beyond pity. To praise the years it took head and heart to hitch, mules finally willing to pull my wagon of tar into the country of humans. If I’m not quite dead, there might still be time, before I say an Al Chet, to ask forgiveness from people I’ve hurt, or made more lonely, even if they’ve ghosted me or become ghosts themselves. So I plead— If you can hear this, please forgive me. You know who you are and might recall me, but even if not, isn’t love all that lasts? Mine and yours. What got us here, takes us out, becomes the amulet we hope survives the ruin. When I was young, I couldn’t imagine a future, the past was bones in a bog, yet they were tied together with forwarding spirals of time all of us flew through, each of us riding our own arrow, feathers flashing our prayers to keep going, to not miss the mark. — Catherine Gonick
THE BABY IN THE SYNAGOGUE doesn’t know where she is, aside from the planet that is her father’s shoulder. The sounds come sometimes from one place and sometimes from everywhere; she knows a little about singing already. And meanwhile the light comes in steady from above, from what will turn out to be windows. The rabbis say that we know absolutely everything until we’re born. They say angels hold it for us while we’re occupied with living. Somewhere between hungry and asleep is this baby in the synagogue. Her father begins to bob in place. Planets shift; everyone sings. — David Ebenbach
VANISHED When we are this age flinty and deductive as geometry we come to think of our parents as birds. Soundless they enter our minds at breakfast, holding the stems of bone-china cups shaking like aspens in November and they rise on those spoke legs letting the wooden table bear them and they speak to us from feather voices in the ceilings Out! They cry. Let us out. So we walk to the cantilevered porch and let their natural history shimmer in the grayshock of old configurations darting past. Look my father would say, pointing: the Canada geese again. And that timed birdsail turns toward Carolina before the first white boot stamps us out. Sky wet as my parents' blue eyes, clouds underlit with the beauty of breasts and swifts in flight, my two small ground-nesting birds so frail, so light they could perish… We look up at certain times of day their plumage trailing like a comet, a stroke of ink on rice paper so quick you can't follow the brush, they vanish as the stately solitaires who mated for life or the elegant, turquoise passenger pigeons so sociable and large-flocking they darkened the sky for days and you'd hear nothing in their wake like the emptiness after the trains flew by on great iron wings. * * * Sadly in the blue light of the blue room we watch the film of utter loneliness. Gone the giant moa which used to roam New Zealand, gone the silly elephant bird From Madagascar. There was a time when hornbills and trogons flew over Paris. There was a time when great auks stood like men on desolate shores. Gone the wren from Stephens Island because of a single cat the lighthouse keeper left outside. Gone the magical dodo of Mauritius, sorely missed, sorely missed. And the heath hens striped like zebras and the Carolina parakeets who threw themselves like a green carpet over land. Never seen again: the pink-headed duck of India or the eerie laughing owl. Gone into hat plumes the egret and the red cock of the rock, dustward the Eskimo curlews who loved to roam… Bless the gorgeous flying osprey who plunges like a knife into the water now as my mother rises from her reading by the crook-necked lamp and my father sleeps in the brown chair. Bless them. Bless the earth simplifying itself. — Marea Gordett
YOM KIPPUR SONNET, WITH A LINE FROM LAMENTATIONS Can a person atone for pure bewilderment? For hyperbole? for being wrong In a thousand categorical opinions? For never opening her mouth, except too soon? For ignoring, all week long, the waning moon Retreating from its haunt above the local canyons, Signaling her season to repent, Then deflecting her repentance with a song? Because the rest is just too difficult to face – What we are – I mean – in all its meagerness – The way we stint on any modicum of kindness – What we allow ourselves – what we don’t learn – How each lapsed, unchanging year resigns us – Return us, Lord, to you, and we’ll return. — Jacqueline Osherow
PRACTICE Maybe this breath, or the next, you’ll go too far. You have to rise up each time to the surface. You have to hoist your whole torso out of the water because what comes on the wind in great gusts is not easy or even but slams into your jaw, your ear, fills your mouth before you can help it, with a heaviness so thick you can’t bear up. And then where will you be, without hope, sunk in this very life, the one that was given you, burdened with belief, in which you set out, arm after arm, each day, to the other shore. — Judith Chalmer
PLASTIC BUTTERFLIES Binghamton, NY Lonely and a little bored, I used to donate blood every eight weeks at the Red Cross across the street from my studio apartment. Eyes skyward, arm shot straight, I’d sigh as the butterfly settled on my skin, its wings drawn to a vein in my forearm: a thin river, ghost blue. And then— warmth. Like an oven turned low, a slow kindling beneath dark winter clothes. Afterward I’d pocket Oreos, fig bars, a few extra juice boxes for later that night, yet leave feeling lighter, like I’d done something no one could diminish. I still donate here downstate, but last spring, after the butterfly’s sting, I blacked out in a synagogue basement— my soaked back on a gurney as the plastic sack swelled. Nowadays I can’t tell who I’m meant to help, or how to help, or if anything really helps anymore, though I guess that’s me feeling lazy and drained while up north, between two frozen rivers, a version of my youth reenters that waiting room beside a rusted diner and a discount department store, lies back, and believes he has so much more to give. — Jared Harel
