As if you were a golem all those years
before
our faces rested together in the dark,
the dumb
shammes, turning in clockwork
with
sunset and the shuffling of pages,
a
blank-faced dust dry of sweat or sorrow
and
blood—the breath that returns to clay,
red
figures on the blackest ground.
As if I
opened your lips and sealed you
as clean
as fire in the singing eye of God
disheveled, untimely, argumentative,
startled
by laughter, surprising with silence,
mortal—not a cuneiform to be cracked
or let
stand, but a palimpsest spilling over,
annotated, rewritten at a blink or a kiss.
As if we
were not the same salt-wet earth,
the same
impressionable flesh and speech.
Pointing
to eidolons, making likenesses
of never
and nowhere, figuring our ways
from
mirror to metaphor: the Mahara"l knew.
Our
ancestors are photographs.
Our
words are the death masks of dreams.
(In the
gematriya of the Other Side,
unspelled by the three angels of Ben-Sira,
Lilith
with ochre-smeared hands throws
a shape
of Adam on the riverbanks of Eden.
Passing
through generation and expulsion,
mixed
like bone-ash with an apple's ribs,
whatever
we caress or grasp, we leave
laughs
in her nightlong arms.)
