As for me, I was hoping the window led out…mystically, hoping above the above, upstairs-upstairs-Upstairs, but no: it’s new town, old evil; new village, only the newest of ruins…eastern form razed razed razed to its very foundation; inhabitants unable to be raised despite the hurt of my howling, whether they’re in hiding or dead, hiding in death, who’s to ask. Skeletally stripped, rippedopen staircases spiraling turretwork, tower’s marrow…what’s a spire and what’s a smokestack, what’s a building or was and what’s grave or a tomb; from this vantage, resembles a cemetery. I lean, I’m leaning, to search, to find, to root amid roots, to moon amidst the maternal…deeply, too far. Finally — painfully, I birth myself from out of the window, tumbling to snow, then down the flank of the mountain, which flows into this plot’s main and only prospekt, when I have none to speak of, and that as no speech. Though even if talk I had in me how, there’d still be no words for where: bombedout, clearedout and out destroyed, then salted with ice so that nothing would grow again, ever. Fallow without jubilee. I fall from the summit of the hill behind me on down to egg the nest of its valley: as if a wedding’s lost band its circumferential containment, the ring of its bind, my mother’s and tarnished…toward its Square down its slope I’m hurtling steeply through the Square proper, which is unpaved, packed earth — only to land slammed against the pediment of a spire forlorn, a towering topple…its Plague Column, I think, what’s called a Pestsäule: a bestially marbleized swirl.
Not quite (which was Aba), have patience as Ima herself would’ve said and I’ll tell you: it’s a schlong…you know of what I’m talking, she’d say, it’s a putz, that’s what, the kind that crawls down below…without legs, to forever beg on its belly for affectionate time — it’s flaccid now and so distended from its plinth, hanging stubbily shrunken atop the dust as if lazily asleep, unaroused. A clotting of vein and frozen gray uncircumcised fleshiness, I’m looking it straight in its eye, without sense. I get myself up and stand a little, then long; entranced, waiting to expect what, I don’t know.
From sunrise on the next morning, which is the Shabbos, the holiest day of the cycle against which this dial’s intermediary shadow has been erected opposed, it begins to fill itself up, to pump stiffly with life as if sucked from below: taller and thicker it grows, its foreskin retracting, until an hour or so before the highest pitch of the day, and there as if dinged struck, stricken at the headhuge clap of the sun, ringing out the sky’s call to account, everyone rise — it’s up fully, and fat and hot, too, melting the weather from around the platform upon which it’s risen, a puddle, a pool…pulsing immaculately in the midst of the Square, and then above the village, the town — expanding hillhigh, extending mountainously and yet soon, as presently noon, casting no shade to speak of: pinkening then fully red and rashy as if alarmed angrily, made mad, and heftily hard, too, with the undiminished course of blood urged up from the earth — life spilled being absorbed again and again into time, and its telling.
At this twelve with its ring donging above from the bell of a church…it explodes into seed, in all pulpy seeds — which hit the rounding, impotent sun, in a great spot of stain…sticking only to drip off that orb as latterday fug — throughout the afternoon dropping away in failed viscous globs.
As nearing sunset again, what’s to expect…it’s gone flaccid again, snakes around itself as if to sleep away a next dark, fenced in and gated safe by its wild pubes sticky and hard at the foot: these wickety weeds I’m stepping on, these slatted stalks I’m stepping around…to smite one off and step on with a staff.
That evening, to ascend the mountain next into night, trailing behind me what still call me by motherly things, they give me no rest was what she’d always say…left dirtied pots and pans over my shoes, I’m stepping mixingbowls halved, dragging threadpulls, unravelings, broombristles and mop-heads and feathers from dusters, knipls and kvitls a tittle yidl zidl yi di di yi di di, clanging and tangling up to the summit one over, upon which I behold another valley below. Here, too, villaged with yet another town, the last of them this last Shabbos, I hope: my father’s town, Aba’s, I’m sure of it, from whence my father’s family had fled or once left, who knew…I do, only now. A town Unaffiliated, maybe, with my mother’s, though it’s been forever a neighbor; or, perhaps unaffiliated in any other, lesser, sense of that slur: that of its rare tidiness, its neatness it’s almost shocking; its relative order as compared to the waste of the barren maternalized just over the hill, down the mound. Never been sacked is what, or not much — at least not as retribution for the imageless worship of a God without son, or in retaliation for the grace of a minority ethic. Unlike by my mother’s, there have never been any pogroms here, nor ghettowide pillage — no prunestewed, beerbothered, sausagestumped rape. From here, my father’s it’s so clean, so beautifully perfect: everything in its proper place, at its proper time, yet abandoned…a clock stilled but still secure in the promise of tick, safe in its jewelcase, the glassy sky clearer, and bright (if only you knew how to wind, wheel its dial the horizon around) — a relic that is its own reliquary’s more like it, as it’s both the object holied and its holying set.
At the summit, I stumble…panting, I trip to fall over this well, halfopened, exposed — in my shock stubbing its lid off to scatter round down the scarp of the next prospekt promised, which is only the manicured furtherance of the previous mud. It flies wildly — skidding its way toward the purity of the village that once iced patrimony, home to the goyim who’d melt down to my father: a townspeople of immaculate surface, a townsfolk cold and of glaciate calm, whose regularity and slowness seem only quaint to me now — though if every once in a century they’d be mannered faster and louder toward strangers surrounding, and even angry, at times, furious and violent, abusive…still, the worst they could ever be accused of within their own world would be the reticent, the reserved, the brutally civiclass="underline" pleasantries toward one another by which to service every occasion, fathering each other with specific forms of formal address. Du, tu, to you, too — I shouldn’t expect the same from myself, halved between valley and vowel. Abandoned alone to my shriek, an echo of the throb of my toe through the straw and a loafer. To curse out of spite that quiet sleepy town down below me — to curse its Church and its steeples, its cross high above as if the tongue of the sky’s bell stilled silent at compline — and that with a mouth lamed by that very Imagelessness all of us bless whether as Father, or God…the gummy gape of the Square, wideopen, welltended, soulless. As if a crumb to poison the churchmice, a collectionplate coined even smaller, or distant — the grating puckish and spun, as if a lid without eye, the knee’s patch of a skullcap, it hits, at long last, to a skittering stop against the westerly wall of this village Town Hall, denting a mark on that venerable frontage, which is as impassive as the ice is gray and yet, now imperfect.
I stand at the rim, the lip of the pit…what, you think I’d only recognize a well I fall into?
Inside, there’s a nipple…just deal, get used to it, will you: after all, this is the very end of the tip, hard up from the puffy. Down there it’s halfburied, not so deep I can’t reach. A giver of life this earthbound nipple, as if the whole world’s a tit and this, its summating jut — springing forth with gainful fluid. A pap that after I go to take hold, it grows, to poke high out from its setting. This, then, a sacred sucklingplace. I fall myself to the ice that surrounds. A nipple of nipples, The Nipple of, an impossibility made mythic, the mythical made possible, pasteurized or homogenized down, skim a percent then decide whether bile or curd…it’s handhard, fistswollen as it seeks at my mouth: all flesh and fiery areole that rises to rim, as a lip at my lips, its tip distended to glory my pucker. I’m thirsty, hungry for edge, even a lick, would settle for swiping…prostrate, initiatory of suckle. I swaddle my beard around its overcast red, Adam’s red, Edom’s red, the unnaturally bloodcoursed, applerashed…having a difficult time because I’m sucking, or trying, and nothing, I’m losing my breath. My mouth stabbed by a phantom. I stroke the whole length, then, attempting to milk the flabelliform thing with hands filthy and rough — in a satisfaction unwashed, and unblessed, this resurrection of the breast of every mothering woman: my sisters’, Ima’s and her mother’s, her mothers’ Imas’ yadda and blah bladdering forever around and around this hefty sphere, this sustenant orb…