Weary soul, weary soul
you are a very particular kind of weary soul
Whose hopes like aleph create from nothing
Whose hands like vav hook my heaven to earth
Whose anguishes like khof hold you closer than I
You who bite your lip until it’s cut
whose laughter melts away frozen lakes
You who knew my heart’s desire was not actually “freedom”
but to be chosen and stay chosen
You whose skin carries the aroma of infinity
whose pores perspire fountains of youth
You who I would die for
and resurrect if told I would only die for you again
I descend the winding stairs possessing legs of glass and arms of paper
with tremors in my veins that portend a deep and wicked unraveling
Rumbling guts, trembling hands, chest without breath
great bolts of pain shooting from heel to knee
and teeth that long both to grind and to stop grinding
Shall we talk of G-d and gods we love and hate?
Shall we talk of kings and men who once were great?
Shall we talk of lands once lost, regained by fate?
Or of the same lands, neglected and defended too late?
Of cattle? Of men? Of cattle-like men? Of bullets and battered meat?
Yea though I ascend to an Eden of milk and honey
or descend to a Gehinnom of worms and shit
the ambiguity of my destination was never enough to make me quit
a life of wagers, of confrontation, of gentle madness
How much easier my days would be
if I were to rage and chase away all around me
curse and spit and claw until even echoes and shadows depart
But how lonely too
oh how very lonely
I offered no quarter to despair
no tolerance for panic
Yet what crept in their place?
Excess of impatience! Dearth of charity!
By grace alone, and not by merit
did those around me stay and give embrace
I would choose every battle, as I did in youth
were it not for my body
budgeting enemies and insults like every other expense
O voice that hides in claps of vicious thunder
will you speak the word in the valley
that reassembles my dry and scattered bones?
Will you speak the word
that reattaches my flesh?
Will you speak the word
that equips me with armor and sword,
and send me to the Fight that will end all fights
For Gog and Magog have no teeth that cannot be kicked in
no lines that cannot be broken or fronts we cannot win
But for now I am at world-end’s sunset
wishing to savor the fruit but unable to bear anymore thorns
This is the first poem I’ve written in seven years. It involves a “mess” of themes that have hovered in the background of my psyche for well over a decade:
Marveling at the beauty of another’s essence and growing so enamored you practically become drunk with infatuation.
The effects of PTSD on one’s emotional life and interior world, and the even greater toll those effects can take on the sufferer’s family members, friends, and lovers.
The sense that one’s gradual physical decline (however slight) is tied somehow to resignation or spiritual fatigue.
The tightness with which we hold onto the hope that all our suffering will be worth it in the end, and pay off in some (as yet unclear) way.
As I came to the close of the poem, I realized that these themes had coalesced into an unintended story in my imagination: a story of a man—elderly—sitting on his porch beside the great love of his life, who he’s spent many years with, and he’s holding her hand at “world-end’s sunset”. World-end’s sunset is not the end of the world, but the end of his world, and it’s an end that he faces fearlessly, but also with unresolved tension and unanswered questions. The verses are grim and yet ultimately the poem is an expression of hope. Thus the structure of the poem begins as a love letter from the man to his woman, then the middle morphs into an inventory the man takes of himself and of his past, and finally the last part is the man praising the power of G-d to renew and raise up.
