Book of Longing Read online

  THE GOAL

  I can’t leave my house

  or answer the phone.

  I’m going down again

  but I’m not alone.

  Settling at last

  accounts of the soul:

  this for the trash,

  that paid in full.

  As for the fall, it

  began long ago:

  Can’t stop the rain,

  Can’t stop the snow.

  I sit in my chair.

  I look at the street.

  The neighbour returns

  my smile of defeat.

  I move with the leaves.

  I shine with the chrome.

  I’m almost alive.

  I’m almost at home.

  No one to follow

  and nothing to teach,

  except that the goal

  falls short of the reach.

  WORK IN PROGRESS

  he’s going to get sick

  and die alone

  he is the main character

  in my little story called

  The House of Prayer

  OPENED MY EYES

  G-d opened my eyes this morning

  loosened the bands of sleep

  let me see

  the waitress’s tiny earrings

  and the merest foothills

  of her small breasts

  multiplied her front and back

  in the double mirrors

  of the restaurant

  granted to me speed

  and the penetration of layers

  and turned me like a spindle

  so I could gather in

  and make my own

  every single version of her beauty

  Thank You Ruler of the World

  Thank You for calling me Honey

  THE CORRECT ATTITUDE

  Except for a couple of hours

  in the morning

  which I passed in the company

  of a sage

  I stayed in bed

  without food

  only a few mouthfuls of water

  “You are a fine-looking old man”

  I said to myself in the mirror

  “And what is more

  you have the correct attitude

  You don’t care if it ends

  or if it goes on

  And as for the women

  and the music

  there will be plenty of that

  in Paradise”

  Then I went to the Mosque

  of Memory

  to express my gratitude

  NOT A JEW

  Anyone who says

  I’m not a Jew

  is not a Jew

  I’m very sorry

  but this decision

  is final

  TITLES

  I had the title Poet

  and maybe I was one

  for a while

  Also the title Singer

  was kindly accorded me

  even though

  I could barely carry a tune

  For many years

  I was known as a Monk

  I shaved my head and wore robes

  and got up very early

  I hated everyone

  but I acted generously

  and no one found me out

  My reputation

  as a Ladies’ Man was a joke

  It caused me to laugh bitterly

  through the ten thousand nights

  I spent alone

  From a third-storey window

  above the Parc du Portugal

  I’ve watched the snow

  come down all day

  As usual

  there’s no one here

  There never is

  Mercifully

  the inner conversation

  is cancelled

  by the white noise of winter

  “I am neither the mind,

  The intellect,

  nor the silent voice within…”

  is also cancelled

  and now Gentle Reader

  in what name

  in whose name

  do you come

  to idle with me

  in these luxurious

  and dwindling realms

  of Aimless Privacy?

  PUPPETS

  German puppets

  burnt the Jews

  Jewish puppets

  did not choose

  Puppet vultures

  eat the dead

  Puppet corpses

  they are fed

  Puppet winds and

  puppet waves

  Puppet sailors

  in their graves

  Puppet flower

  Puppet stem

  Puppet Time

  dismantles them

  Puppet me and

  puppet you

  Puppet German

  Puppet Jew

  Puppet presidents

  command

  puppet troops to

  burn the land

  Puppet fire

  puppet flames

  feed on all the

  puppet names

  Puppet lovers

  in their bliss

  turn away from

  all of this

  Puppet reader

  shakes his head

  takes his puppet

  wife to bed

  Puppet night

  comes down to say

  the epilogue to

  puppet day

  NEVER ONCE

  India is filled

  with many

  exceptionally beautiful women

  who don’t desire me

  I verify this

  every single day

  as I walk around

  the city of Bombay

  I look into face after face

  and never once

  have I been wrong

  WHO DO YOU REALLY REMEMBER

  My father died when I was nine;

  my mother when I was forty-six.

  In between, my dog and several friends.

  Recently, more friends,

  real friends,

  uncles and aunts,

  many acquaintances.

  And then there’s Sheila.

  She said, Don’t be a jerk, Len.

  Take your desire seriously.

  She died not long after

  we were fifteen.

  LOOKING AWAY

  you would look at me

  and it never occurred to me

  that you might be choosing

  the man of your life

  you would look at me

  over the bottles and the corpses

  and I thought

  you must be playing with me

  you must think I’m crazy enough

  to step behind your eyes

  into the open elevator shaft

  so I looked away

  and I waited

  until you became a palm tree

  or a crow

  or the vast grey ocean of wind

  or the vast grey ocean of mind

  now look at me

  married to everyone but you

  EVEN SOME OF MY OWN

  This is the end of it all

  There won’t be much more

  Maybe a cry or two

  From the peanut gallery

  Where I have made

  My last stand

  In the meantime

  Operate on the heart

  With proven songs

  Such as Ave Marie

  And Kol Nidre

  Even some of my own

  And execute

  The recommended procedures

  Such as kneeling down

  Beside the appalling heap

  Of days and nights

  And patting the newest seconds

  On to it

  As if it were

  A child’s sandcastle

  Facing the tide

  Under a full moon etc.

  In other wor
ds

  Encouraging

  In the old penitent

  A borderless perspective

  YOUR HEART

  I told the truth

  and look where it got me

  I should have written about

  the secret rivers

  under Toronto

  and the trials

  of the Faculty Club

  but no

  I pulled the heart

  out of a breast

  and showed to everyone

  the names of G-d

  engraved upon it

  I’m sorry it was

  your heart

  and not mine

  I had no heart worth the reading

  but I had the knife

  and the temple

  O my love

  don’t you know that we have been killed

  and that we died together

  WHAT BAFFLED ME

  I took pills for my memory

  but I could not stop it

  from erasing

  I had a family once

  They could walk on water

  There was a one-way chain

  that held me to a woman’s body

  She didn’t know she jerked me

  every-which-way

  But who was she

  and who were they?

  In the midst of

  someone’s explanation

  I forget

  what baffled me

  THE WIND MOVES

  The wind moves

  the palm trees

  and the fringes

  of the beach umbrellas

  The children go down

  the waterslide

  The grey Arabian Sea

  slaps its soiled lace underwear

  on the dirty flats

  The wind moves everything

  and then stops

  but my pen

  keeps on writing

  by itself

  Dear Roshi

  I am dead now

  I died before you

  just as you predicted

  in the early 70s

  SORROWS OF THE ELDERLY

  The old are kind.

  The young are hot.

  Love may be blind.

  Desire is not.

  ALONE AT LAST

  How bitter were

  the Prozac pills

  of the last

  few hundred mornings

  ANYTHING WHICH REFERS

  Anything which refers to the matter, even obliquely, is far from the mark. An incapacity for relevance is to be discovered as the muscle of salvation, but flexed and exercised as rarely as possible. The economy of desperation must be recognized. We don’t need Art that often. Now and then let Her step out of Her underwear. A little goes a long way.

  For the moment, the Big Picture (or the Pig Bicture) can be accessed only by means of the Loose Canon (or the Coose Lanon), the Drifting Molecule, the Carcinogenic Radical. Après moi, the return to Classical Proportion. My sanity is a contagion.

  Although we have not smoked for many a minute, we are tempted to ask the barman for one from his own pack.

  Let us concentrate on the vertigo produced by easing up to the great plate-glass windows, which are all that prevent us from plunging 12 storeys into the Bay of Bengal.

  – The Taj Mahal Hotel

  JANA THINKS OF JOHN

  Jana comes out of her house. Wearing almost nothing. The cup is still in her hand. She forgot to leave it on the table. The cold reminds her that she has neglected to dress beyond her underwear and her slip. She turns back. Shivering. Damn you, damn you, John.

  She doesn’t know G-d has already killed her, and John, and Teri her Persian, and yours truly, who loves her more fiercely than John or Teri, merely because she is a woman. She doesn’t know that G-d has killed everyone.

  Jana was with me once. When she was younger. When she was experimenting with the old. I want to get to know your body, Jikan. Oh sure. This is sufficiently grotesque, Jana, without my undressing. But she doesn’t call out my name as she returns to her unlocked door.

  Me, I understand. John, I understand. Jana, I understand, although I hate to lose a naked woman. But Teri, why was Teri killed, as soon as G-d imagined her?

  I was one of the things that was put into Jana. Once you have been put in, you have been put in forever. That is love. Sometimes it is greater than Death, sometimes smaller, sometimes the same size.

  John has been killed, but that is not why his name is in her throat. It is because she is dismantled in her need of him. It used to be some kind of love but now it is beyond that in the magnitude of pain and dislocation. She has utterly forgotten that she has been killed. Do not comment on this condition unless you’ve been there.

  Still, life goes on. Jana thinks of John, not me. He takes her out to the racing car garage, and she guesses which is his. She is wearing a white sweater which she bought when she was an Italian. (Milan. Mussolini’s train station. Kind, grass-stained women I never saw again. All of us killed under the tidal beauty of coming and going.) They kiss. He is off the hook. Her essence is the very leatherness of the bucket seats of his Ferrari.

  And over here, my destiny whispers, “Someday in your arms, she will come to understand that she never did anything. And then she will be killed. Many like her will come to you. Many have already come. You have a job. You are a man-at-work, and you have been killed, along with the whole barber-shop, without a hitch.”

  MY TIME

  My time is running out

  and still

  I have not sung

  the true song

  the great song

  I admit

  that I seem

  to have lost my courage

  a glance at the mirror

  a glimpse into my heart

  makes me want

  to shut up forever

  so why do you lean me here

  Lord of my life

  lean me at this table

  in the middle of the night

  wondering

  how to be beautiful

  LOOKING THROUGH MY DREAMS

  I was looking through my dreams

  when I saw myself

  looking through my dreams

  looking through my dreams

  and so on and so forth

  until I was consumed

  in the mysterious activity

  of expansion and contraction

  breathing in and out at the same time

  and disappearing naturally

  up my own asshole

  I did this for 30 years

  but I kept coming back

  to let you know how bad it felt

  Now I’m here at the end of the song

  the end of the prayer

  The ashes have fallen away at last

  exactly as they’re supposed to do

  The chains have slowly

  followed the anchors

  to the bottom of the sea

  It’s merely a song

  merely a prayer

  Thank you, Teachers

  Thank you, Everyone

  So Do You

  Because you are beautiful, but smelled bad, I knew you had been killed. And you felt the same about me. You said, “You are an elegant old man, but you stink.” After the long event of naked intervention, you brought your hands together and bowed. “Thank you,” you said. “That was the first time I never did anything.” Many are the lovely things I have been told about my luck, but this was surely the loveliest. “How do I smell now?” I asked. “Worse than ever,” you said. “Exactly my impression about you,” I said. Then you went back to France (or was it Holland?) and we have remained fast friends ever since. Sometimes, when the hummingbirds are still, I can smell you rotting halfway across the world.

  Now IN MY ROOM

  O my Love

  I found You again

  I went out

  for a pack of cigarettes

  and there You were />
  I bowed to everyone

  and they rejoiced with me

  I lost myself

  in the eyes of a dog

  who loved You

  The heat lifted me up

  The traffic bounced me

  naked into bed

  with a book about You

  and a bottle of cold water

  THE DARKNESS ENTERS

  The darkness enters my hotel room

  like a curtain coming through a curtain

  billowing into different shapes of darkness

  wings here a gas mask there,

  simple things and double things

  I sit upright on the edge of the bed

  and I impede the falling darkness

  with my many personalities

  just as a high spiked fence

  with the tips painted gold

  interferes with the French rain

  For a number of luminous hours

  it is a standoff

  Often during this highly charged segment

  of my usually monotonous life

  a woman enters the room with a pass-key

  and in small ways manages to communicate

  that we might have lived our lives together

  had circumstances been otherwise

  I like it especially

  when she addresses me in the familiar form

  of her incomprehensible language

  but always in the back of my mind

  I know the important moments

  are on their way

  and I am that high iron fence

  with the spikes painted gold

  holding off the inevitable

  SUGGESTIONS

  “We are college girls from Ontario.”

  “What part of Ontario?”

  “We don’t know Ontario. We were told to say we were from there.”

  “I see.”

  They moved purposefully around the kitchen, lighting and extinguishing the gas range, checking the pilot lights, extracting pots from crowded cabinets, kneeling in front of the crisper, but no food was actually cooked or served.