Frayed Light. Yonatan Berg
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56
Part I
HANDS
THAT
ONCE
HELD
MANNA
LETTER TO THE READER
In conversations I cannot explain myself—still
an erupting mass of arrogant youth: fruits of conflict
with the body, an overflow of zeal trapped
inside, a decisive lack of seriousness,
traits acquired when I left
the grim corridor, too brightly lit with mitzvoth.
The constant urge to touch, I know,
means always to be thirsty.
I’m embarrassed by nudity, weeping, moments
of pure stupidity, gatherings with a family
that only asks to be left alone.
I try, time after time
to talk to the boy I could have been—
the engaged one, the generous, self-controlled one who pauses
before opening doors, allowing the dogs to run wild into the future.
They bark, my faithful friends of heresy,
of despair and self-denial, forever running inside me
with crude enthusiasm. Now, so it seems,
it’s too late to change, too late
for caution. How I love the sound of glass
hitting the floor of the room, yes, you know it—
pushing through the midnight gate and beyond
to the flat surface, the silvery one,
the tired pipe organ of creation.
I apologize to each and every one of you
that I cannot touch, cannot reach out
to ease your pain, cannot hold you to me,
knowing I will ruin it all by saying something about the self—
something too flowery, too sophisticated. That being the case,
this letter becomes one blurry trail
of what, at day’s end,
I really wanted to whisper in your ear.
UNITY
We travel the silk road of evening,
tobacco and desire flickering
between our hands. We are warm travelers,
our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,
in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.
We break bread under the pistachio tree,
under the Banyan tree, under the dark
of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up
in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel
in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices
announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops
heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,
with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,
traveling with ardour in our loins, with the cry of birth.
We sit crossed-legged within the rocking
of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells
of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel
through