Book of Mercy Read online

  20

  LIKE AN UNBORN INFANT swimming to be born, like a woman counting breath in the spasms of labour, I yearn for you. Like a fish pulled to the minnow, the angler to the point of line and water, I am fixed in a strict demand, O king of absolute unity. What must I do to sweeten this expectancy, to rescue hope from the scorn of my enemy? The child is born into your world, the fish is fed and the fisherman too. Bathsheba lies with David, apes come down from the Tower of Babel, but in my heart an ape sees the beauty bathing. From every side of Hell is my greed affirmed. O shield of Abraham, affirm my hopefulness.

  21

  MY TEACHER GAVE ME what I do not need, told me what I need not know. At a high price he sold me water beside the river. In the middle of a dream he led me gently to my bed. He threw me out when I was crawling, took me in when I was home. He referred me to the crickets when I had to sing, and when I tried to be alone he fastened me to a congregation. He curled his fists and pounded me toward my proper shape. He puked in disgust when I swelled without filling. He sank his tiger teeth into everything of mine that I refused to claim. He drove me through the pine trees at an incredible speed to that realm where I barked with a dog, slid with the shadows, and leaped from a point of view. He let me be a student of a love that I will never be able to give. He suffered me to play at friendship with my truest friend. When he was certain that I was incapable of self-reform, he flung me across the fence of the Torah.

  22

  YOUR CUNNING CHARLATAN is trying to whip up a frisson of grace. He wants a free ride and a little on the side. He has hid his shame under a tired animal gleam, and he pretends to be full of health. He’s working hard, dragging that donkey up Mount Moriah. And listen to the authentic muffled cry of his heart, so thoroughly documented and unattended. He has some pictures in his mind, they’re all round and wet, very pressing, and he has his belt, he’s going to give her what she wants. Bring a mirror, let him see the monkey struggling with the black tefillin straps. Where is she, Lord of Unity, where is the kind face, the midnight help, the autumn wedding, the wedding with no blood?

  23

  MY SISTER AND I BEING estranged, I parked my trailer at the furthest limit of her fields, the corner that is left, by law, to the poor. Her hundreds of cherry trees were blossoming, and on the road to the great stone house that they lined, a lacework of petals. It was a Saturday. I reclined against a little hill, a shoot of wheat between my teeth, looked at the blue sky, a bird, three threads of luminous cloud, and my heart would not rejoice. I entered the hour of self-accusation. A strange sound trembled in the air. It was caused by the north wind on the electric lines, a sustained chord of surprising harmonies, power and duration, greatly pleasing, a singing of breath and steel, a huge string instrument of masts and fields, complex tensions. Suddenly the judgement was clear. Let your sister, with her towers and gardens, praise the incomparable handiwork of the Lord, but you are pledged to the breath of the Name. Each of you in your proper place. The cherry trees are hers, the grapes and the olives, the thick-walled house; and to you, the unimagined charities of accident in the Corner of the Poor.

  24

  IN THE THIN LIGHT OF hunted pleasure, I become afraid that I will never know my sorrow. I call on you with a cry that concentrates the heart. When will I cry out in gratitude? When will I sing to your mercy? Tomorrow is yours, the past is in debt, and death runs toward me with the soiled white flag of surrender. O draw me out of an easy skill into the art of the holy. I am afraid of what I have done to my soul, and the judgement is established like a sudden noise. O help me bow down to your anger. I lie beside the corpse of my idol, in the spell of fire and ashes, my word for the day of atonement forgotten. Lift me up with a new heart, with an old memory, for my father’s sake, for the sake of your name which rings in heaven and hell, through worlds destroyed and worlds to come, tangible music shining between the hidden and the perceived, garbled in my ear and clearly the place I stand on, O precious name of truth uncontradicting. The scornful man will bend his knee, and holy souls will be drawn down into his house. Hedges will be planted in the rotting world, the young shoots protected. Time will be measured from mother to child, from father to son, and learning will speak to learning. Even the evil are weary, the bomb falls on the pilot’s son, the riot shouts out to be calmed. The wound widens every heart, the general exile thickens, the whole world becomes the memory of your absence. How long will you hunt us with sorrow? How long will they rage, the fires of refinement? Blood drinking blood, wound swallowing wound, sorrow torturing sorrow, cruelty rehearsing itself under the measureless night of your patience. When will the work of truth begin, to verify your promise? Now that all men hear each other, let your name be established in hell, and count us back to the safety of your law, father of mercy, bride of the captured earth. Speak to your child of his healing, in this place where we are for a moment.

  25

  MY SON AND I LIVED IN A cave for many years, hiding from the Romans, the Christians, and the apostate Jews. Night and day we studied the letters of one word. When one of us grew tired, the other would urge him on. One morning he said, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and I said ‘I agree.’ He married a beautiful girl, the daughter of one of our benefactors, grown from the child who brought us food in the night to the one for whom he waited all day, and they were blessed with children. My wife came back to me one strange afternoon, all changed, all lightened, and we opened a bookstall in Jerusalem, where we sold small bilingual editions of the Book of Psalms. My daughter appeared one day and said, ‘I believe you have neglected me.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, and her face shone with forgiveness. She married a goldsmith, a maker of ceremonial objects, bore children, and deepened the happiness of her parents. Every so often we gather at midnight before the Wall, our family of little families. ‘After all,’ we say, ‘the Romans do not eat flesh torn from a living animal, and the Christians are a branch of the tree, and the apostate Jews are still embraced by the Word.’ We talk in this manner, we sing the time-honoured songs, and we compose new ones, as we were commanded:

  Jerusalem of blood

  Jerusalem of amnesia

  Jerusalem of idolatry

  Jerusalem of Washington

  Jerusalem of Moscow

  Let the nations rejoice

  Jerusalem has been destroyed

  26

  SIT IN A CHAIR AND KEEP still. Let the dancer’s shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer’s chest from your chest, the dancer’s loins from your loins, the dancer’s hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves, and let him serve God in beauty. When he fails, send him again from your chair. By such an exercise, even a bitter man can praise Creation, even a heavy man can swoon, and a man of high responsibility soften his heart.

  II

  27

  ISRAEL, AND YOU WHO call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy. Who will say it? Will America say, We have stolen it, or France step down? Will Russia confess, or Poland say, We have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering in the immunity of superstition. Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness, and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy made you wise? Will Ishmael declare, We are in debt forever? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless. To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the
heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.

  28

  YOU WHO POUR MERCY INTO hell, sole authority in the highest and the lowest worlds, let your anger disperse the mist in this aimless place, where even my sins fall short of the mark. Let me be with you again, absolute companion, let me study your ways which are just beyond the hope of evil. Seize my heart out of its fantasy, direct my heart from the fiction of secrecy, you who know the secrets of every heart, whose mercy is to be the secret of longing. Let every heart declare its secret, let every song disclose your love, let us bring to you the sorrows of our freedom. Blessed are you, who opens a gate in every moment, to enter in truth or tarry in hell. Let me be with you again, let me put this away, you who wait beside me, who have broken down your world to gather hearts. Blessed is your name, blessed is the confession of your name. Kindle the darkness of my calling, let me cry to the one who judges the heart in justice and mercy. Arouse my heart again with the limitless breath you breathe into me, arouse the secret from obscurity.

  29

  BLESS THE LORD, O MY soul, who made you a singer in his holy house forever, who has given you a tongue like the wind, and a heart like the sea, who has journeyed you from generation to generation to this impeccable moment of sweet bewilderment. Bless the Lord who has surrounded the traffic of human interest with the majesty of his law, who has given a direction to the falling leaf, and a goal to the green shoot. Tremble, my soul, before the one who creates good and evil, that a man may choose among worlds; and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere. Bless the one who judges you with his strap and his mercy, who covers with a million years of dust those who say, I have not sinned. Gather me, O my soul, around your longing, and from your eternal place inform my homelessness, that I may bring you forth and husband you, and make the day a throne for your activity, and the night a tower for your watchfulness, and all my time your just dominion. Sing, my soul, to the one who moves like music, who comes down like steps of lightning, who widens space with the thought of his name, who returns like death, deep and intangible, to his own absence and his own glory. Bless the Lord, O my soul, draw down the blessing of authority, that you may invite me to uncover you, and hold you precious till I’m worn away, and we are refreshed, soul and shadow, refreshed and rested like a sundial standing in the night. Bless the Lord, O my soul, cry out toward his mercy, cry out with tears and song and every instrument, stretch yourself toward the undivided glory which he established merely as his footstool, when he created forever, and he made it-is-finished, and he signed the foundations of unity, and polished the atoms of love to shine back beams and paths and gates of return. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless his name forever.

  30

  HERE THE DESTRUCTION is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food. The bride and the bridegroom sink down to combine, and flesh is brought forth as if it were child. They bring their unclean hands to secret doctors, amazed at their pain, as if they had washed their hands, as if they had lifted up their hands. They write and they weep, as though evil were the miracle. They hear bad tidings, as though they were the judge. They run to what they have not soiled, but the trees and waters hide themselves behind a blessing which they are too proud to know. What they kill is already dead, and what they eat, though it be the wildest berry and they suck it from the stem, has withered long before. Let them lie on the grass, they lie on a machine. There is no world without the blessing, and every plate to which they drop their face is an abomination of blood and suffering and maggots. They leap on the hunchback with a knife, they tear at the young girl’s halter, because there is no fence in their heart, nor knowledge of the one who varies the appearance of his creatures. The dew is not dew that has not been petitioned. Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession. And still we hear, If only this nation had a soul, or, Let us change the way we trade, or, Let us be proud of our region.

  31

  WHEN I HAVE NOT RAGE or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents’ room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.

  32

  WE CRY OUT FOR WHAT WE have lost, and we remember you again. We look for each other, we cannot find us, and we remember you. From the ground of no purpose our children accuse us, and we remember, we recall a purpose. Could it be? we wonder. And here is death. Could it possibly be? And here is old age. And we never knew; we never stood up, and the good land was taken from us, and the sweet family was crushed. Maybe, we said, it could be, and we gave it a place among the possibilities. I’ll do it myself, we said, as shame thickened the faculties of the heart. And the first reports were of failure, and the second of mutilations, and the third of every abomination. We remember, we cry out to you to return our soul. Is it really upon us? Yes, it is upon us. Do we merit this? Yes, we merit this. We cry out for what we have lost, and we remember you. We remember the containing word, the holy channels of commandment, and goodness waiting forever on the Path. And here and there, among the seventy tongues and the hundred darknesses – something, something shining, men of courage strengthening themselves to kindle the lights of repentance.

  33

  YOU WHO QUESTION SOULS, and you to whom souls must answer, do not cut off the soul of my son on my account. Let the strength of his childhood lead him to you, and the joy of his body stand him upright in your eyes. May he discern my prayer for him, and to whom it is uttered, and in what shame. I received the living waters and I held them in a stagnant pool. I was taught but I did not teach. I was loved but I did not love. I weakened the name that spoke me, and I chased the light with my own understanding. Whisper in his ear. Direct him to a place of learning. Illuminate his child’s belief in mightiness. Rescue him from those who want him with no soul, who have their channels in the bedrooms of the rich and poor, to draw the children into death. Let him see me coming back. Allow us to bring forth our souls together to make a place for your name. If I am too late, redeem my yearning in his heart, bless him with a soul that remembers you, that he may u
ncover it with careful husbandry. They who wish to devour him have grown powerful on my idleness. They have a number for him, and a chain. Let him see them withered in the light of your name. Let him see their dead kingdom from the mountain of your word. Stand him up upon his soul, bless him with the truth of manhood.

  34

  YOU ARE WITH ME STILL. Even though I have been removed, and my place does not recognize me. Even though I have filled my heart with stones. And my beloved says, I will wait a little while behind this curtain – no, I have waited too long. You are with me still. Though I scorched away the tears of return in the forced light of victory, your rebuke still comforts me, you signify yourself among the dangers. Saying, Use this fear to know me, fix this exile toward my return. Though I am unwept, it is your judgement parches me. Though my praises for you are under ban, it is the balance of your mercy. And you are with me still. Saying, Search this out, it is you who have hidden yourself. Saying, Clear me in your troubled heart. Saying, I will come to you. Saying, I am here. Though I add membrane to membrane against your light, and heap up cities on the husk of your rebuke, when the sun and the moon are shining in the other pan, and you advance me through the solitude by such a kind degree, and you create the world before my eyes, and the one who hides in self-disgrace cannot say Amen, O slow to anger, you are with me, you are with me still.